Two snakes

As I was riffling through a few of the LH's photographs to illustrate an article I'm working on, this image of a basaltic cliff jumped out at me. The concentric circles on the upper rock suggest the locale was Barrata Tank, a permanent water hole in Hell Canyon upstream from the SR 89 crossing. The thematic glyphs at Barrata are representations of the sun and other circles.

However, it was the snake that actually caught my eye. The shape of the head is that of a rattler. Furthermore, the zigzag is quite like the design of one of my favorite sweatshirts! In keeping with this theme, I also turned up the photo below; it's difficult to make out this fellow's head tho it's there in the center of his coil. On the other hand, his telltale rattle is very evident. But there's absolutely nothing zigzag about him.

I don't know if there are other pictures of any snakes, much less rattlers, in the LH's archives. Possibly not, because we saw few on our outings. Very strange -- there was a restaurant operator down in Peeple's Valley who was afraid of rattlers; he found them every time he ventured into the bush. We wanted to see snakes and so they made themselves scarce. The four rattlers we met in nearly 20 years of boondocking were 1) hiding in the rocks on the west side of Sycamore Canyon; 2) among the rocks on the way to the dam at Watson Lake; 3) among some boulders out Downers' Trail (pre-development), plus one timber rattler in the middle of the Copper Basin Road up near Spruce Mountain. Go figure.

Links to the Works of Nature: Finally an I-was-there description of the Great Snow of 19-aught-67; this by LindaG at her new Prescott Past blog. She was snowed in at Groom Creek. Maria Langer posts re: the dangers of quick sand in desert rivers, the Hassayampa in this case. Steve Ayres has written a report on getting to the bottom of Montezuma's Well. And for a really big picture of the natural earth, there's no better place than the daily photo from space at NASA's Earth Observatory. OK, OK, this just in -- and off-topic, but plenty worth the visit -- ROL Cats, translated from the Russian.