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<\/a><\/p>\nLate spring, 1993.\u00a0 I\u2019m leaving for a summer guiding job Alaska the next morning.\u00a0 It\u2019s not enough that I will be in Alaska for the entire summer in a day, I still have to get in one more session on the local trout creeks before I leave.\u00a0 Never enough fishing in those days, I look back at photo albums from the 90\u2019s– man did I fish a lot. \u00a0You put in that much time on the water, and some shit is going to get caught, and I took pictures of most of it.<\/p>\n
My fishing partner on the day was the Gunnar, then as now the first one to get a call when I want someone to join me.\u00a0\u00a0To set the stage a bit let me just say that Gunnar is not a fan of snakes, does not like snakes, is\u00a0scared of snakes.\u00a0 And just to make sure, every couple of years I break out a wooden jointed snake that I bought just to scare him with.\u00a0 I will sometimes stow it my fly tying box, and dig it out at an opportune moment at a parking lot next to a steelhead river somewhere.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u201cLook what I found\u201d, I say with a tone bound to invoke curiosity.\u00a0 He pokes his head around the car, I\u2019ll turn towards him, waving the fake snake. Hilarity ensues.<\/p>\n
One time, maybe a year or two earlier we were poking around on the Apple River, looking for trout [we found some].\u00a0 Gunnar was leading the way as we hiked the trail back to the truck.\u00a0 Suddenly he stopped in mid stride, one foot still up in the air.\u00a0 This was followed by a strange dance, along with some whooping and yelling.\u00a0 I quickly spotted the cause of this strange behavior\u2014laying across the trail was about two feet of snake.\u00a0 Mind you there was two feet we could see\u2014I think there was another two feet on each side of the trail we couldn\u2019t see, and this was by far the biggest snake I\u2019ve ever seen in the wild.\u00a0 It was about as big around as my wrist, and at least six feet long.\u00a0 Of course I had to grab it, but the front end was too far into the undergrowth for me to be able to wrestle it out.\u00a0 To this day, I\u2019m not sure what kind it was; due to its size it was most likely a bull snake.\u00a0 Much to my dismay, I had to let it go and watched it quickly disappear into the bushes.<\/p>\n
Alright back to the day of the rattlesnake.\u00a0 We were going to spend the day in the canyon section of the Lower Kinni, hard to access then and now.\u00a0 You really need to hike in from the top or bottom access points, which is what we did.\u00a0 Planning on spending the day, we brought enough food and drink [in those days this meant Doritos and Mountain Dew].\u00a0 Thinking back on the day, I don\u2019t recall anything special about the fishing\u2014I \u2018m sure we nymphed our way up and buggered our way back down, catching plenty of wild browns along the way.\u00a0 We had made it up the river as far as we usually go, it\u2019s a good area with a couple of runs next to each other.\u00a0 So I\u2019m upstream of Gunnar, retying or something when I see a snake coming down the stream.\u00a0 Having spent a lot of time in the area, I\u2019ve seen snakes around before [as in the aforementioned incident at the Apple River], at first glance I figured it to be a fox or bull snake so my interest was piqued, but as it came closer, its head popped all the way out of the water and I could see that it was triangular in shape.\u00a0 Being an amateur herpetologist, I knew this meant VENEMOUS.\u00a0 When would I get another chance at a venomous snake?\u00a0 Not anytime soon, [no snakes of ANY kind in Alaska!] so the next thing you know I was roll casting loops of fly line around the thing to keep it in the river.\u00a0 I yelled for Gunnar to get up to me.\u00a0 He runs up and was all \u201cWhat the F are you doing, leave that thing alone\u201d.\u00a0 It was too late. I had pulled a stick from a nearby log jam and had pinned the snake\u2019s head down.\u00a0 I grabbed it behind the head and yelled for Gunnar to get the camera out of the case around my neck.\u00a0 No effin way was the answer I got. After a bit of pleading, he finally took the camera and managed to click the picture shown. Such a cool picture, the snake looks awesome, too bad there are the distractions of the questionable red bandana around my neck, the giant sunglasses, and the bandage on my hand from an unrelated injury.\u00a0 I sent the snake on its way up a dry tributary creek bed, and it was time to head back down the canyon. I livened up the walk out with an occasional “chickachickachickachicka”, my impersonation of a rattlesnake.\u00a0\u00a0“Not funny” was the answer I always got back.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t seen another one in the many trips I\u2019ve made back there since, nor have I talked to anyone else who has run across one.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been told that the Kinni Valley is the northern border of where they are found. I\u2019ve always liked snakes\u2014ask my mom about the time when I was 8 and I filled a wading pool with about 50 garter snakes if you want a good story\u2014the way she reacted you\u2019d think they were cobras or demons or something. Or about the time when I was about six when I was chasing down a particularly big garter snake.\u00a0 I went into some tall weeds after it and the nifty terrycloth outfit I was wearing got so many stickers in it that it had to be thrown out.\u00a0 The snake got away.\u00a0\u00a0 I hated that outfit anyway.<\/p>\n Some other cool snake sightings include the python sized things sometimes spotted along the pools at the famous Seven Pines Lodge.\u00a0 While teaching fly fishing schools there they have provided some extra entertainment\/drama.\u00a0 On a couple of occasions I have encountered a green snake.\u00a0 I suspect they are more common than we would realize, as they blend in perfectly with their surroundings.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n