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More => Old Versions => Media Center 11 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: JimH on March 23, 2003, 02:59:30 pm

Title: Comic Relief -- Rattlesnakes
Post by: JimH on March 23, 2003, 02:59:30 pm

I took a trip down to Nebraska this weekend.  The pictures are here:

http://www.jriver.com/photos/jimh/nebraska2003/

I know a lot of people think it's flat, but it ain't necessarily so.  Here's a sample.

http://www.jriver.com/photos/jimh/nebraska2003/DSC02518.JPG

I took that picture just after this one:

http://www.jriver.com/photos/jimh/nebraska2003/DSC02517.JPG

That's Cory Palmer, who lives near where I was spending some time.  Cory is standing at the fence where you can see more or less straight down a couple hundred feet, telling how there are a couple of dens of rattlers down the hill, and when folks hunt them, they usually find between 25 and 50 snakes.  You can see I'm standing back a way.

We got there in Cory's middle pickup, not the go-to-town pickup, or the fence-mending pickup.  It's the one he hauls a horse trailer with when he goes to rodeos.

We rode the pickup in through a barbed wire gate, and about a mile across a field, leaving the gate wide open behind us.  "What about those horses?", I asked.  "Aw, they won't go near the gate.  They've been out in this field all winter."

It went on like this for about an hour, and I think it was one of the nicer rides I've had in the last few years.  Cory is a gentleman, a determined young rancher, and has killed a lot more rattlesnakes than I plan to.

But the horses had one foot out the gate when we got back.

Title: Re: Comic Relief -- Rattlesnakes
Post by: JimH on March 23, 2003, 03:03:04 pm

And there's a reason I'm hanging onto the bridge in this picture:

http://www.jriver.com/photos/jimh/nebraska2003/DSC02505.JPG

The guardrail is about 18 inches high.  It's a one-lane bridge across the Niobrara River, and about every fifth plank is a little rotten.