Creatures Lurking in NC – Linville Gorge on July 4th

Beautiful fellow with 13 buttons.  Lucky to see him on a glorious morning climbing Shortoff!

Oh dang that second shot is beautiful. That is not the type of terrain I am used to as an AZ/CA hiker. Wow.

Thank you for sharing.

Locally we commonly call this “The Ditch”. Lucky to have the Gorge in my back yard!

Nice set of rattles. Arizona has more species of rattlesnakes than any other state and we see them regularly but never seen one with that pattern and design. Do you know the type?

Oh, that’s some gorgeous terrain.

I had to look it up. We have 3 types: Eastern Timber, Eastern Diamondback and Pigmy, in addition to other poisonous cotton mouths,  copperheads and coral snakes. This is a Eastern Timber Rattlesnake.

“We have 3 types: Eastern Timber, Eastern Diamondback and Pigmy”

Good info and that explains something that happened earlier this week. We were coming out of the wilderness and met three Kentuckians on their way in. They had dropped their stuff and were clustered around looking at one’s phone. The guy with the phone had just stepped over a rattlesnake and they were all pumped up. The image showed a diamondback, the most common rattler around here. Then he asked, “a western diamondback?” He was familiar with the eastern variety it seems but it is unusual to anything more than diamondback around here.