Packed for Death Valley but What Am I missing...

[Vaughn]

Everything I have read says to keep the bit limb below the heart.

Also about 25% of rattlesnake bits are only warnings -- no venom injected.

[Preston]

Vaughn,

I stand corrected--level with, or below the heart, according to the EMT textbook.

--P

[Drew Wiley]

The best thing is to stay calm and walk slow to a cool stream and immerse the bitten
limb in the cold water to slow the circulation of the poison. That's real easy to do in
Death Valley ... heh,heh! Since snake boots are so cumbersome to hike in, a trick I
used to use was to wear bell-bottom Levis. The rattler senses heat coming off the
pants and aims for the surface, rather than your actual leg. It saved me from an actual bite once.

[tgtaylor]

An uncharted, maybe even unknown petroglyph that I ran across while looking for Sky Rock.



This was shot on Ilford SFX using a polarizer and developed in plain ole D-76 After meeting John I switched to his WD2D+.

[goamules]

Gaiters...the snake will be laughing so hard he won't strike. Having hiked for 20 years in the southwest the best advise I can give, since we are transforming this thread:

1. Don't stick hands in holes or climb skree or rocks with a lot of cracks. (That's where they hide, already mentioned above).
2. Don't walk fast during periods snakes come out (sunset to night). You will surprise one and it won't have time to give a warning rattle. If you are hustling around looking for firewood right before dark, you could get more than you were looking for.
3. Be very cautious at night (that's when they are out). If you vaguely discern a long, dark shape in front of you in the moonlight, it's probably not a root or discarded belt.

Things of questionable usefulness:

1. Putting out snake deterrent.
2. Laying a rope around your sleeping bag.
3. Worrying about snakes in the dead of winter when it drops below freezing every night.
4. Wearing gaiters.

[tgtaylor]

Well one thing for sure you don't want to do is to stick your hand around the backside of that petroglyph to see if there is something stashed back there.

[Drew Wiley]

An item in my collection is a carved soapstone rattlesnake rattle, probably Yokuts
four or five hundred years old, and apparently some shaman's cure for snakebite.
Probably worked about as well for a field cure as any of the ideas we have. Rattler
bites are rarely fatal, though miserable enough. The deaths I personally knew of were from people who panicked and tried running for help, making the blood circulate fast. I picked up a baby rattler by the tail when I was three years old and
scared the heck out of my parents. For some reason it didn't bite. The little ones are
the most dangerous of all because they don't know how to meter their venom. Also
somewhere in my collections I have a preserved rattleless adult diamondback. A
handful of these turned up in the Sierras, apparently an adaptation to decades of
being eradicated by ranchers.

[Drew Wiley]

Another pleasant thought - down on the floor of Death Valley I'd be more concerned
about scorpions than snakes. It's one of the few places on earth where there are
potentially fatal scorpions. They're straw colored and more slender than ordinary
scorpions, with bigger poison sacks. I've seen them in the Furnace Creek area.
I hear they like to hide inside camera bellows, but that's just a rumor.

[dsphotog]

Don't go barefoot, I saw a couple tiny scorpions (about 1- 1 1/2 inch) at night, across the road from Stovepipe Wells.