Here are the long-anticipated Rattlesnake Roundup pictures. There were lots and lots of scary and smelly things to see, but not very many things that I wanted to get close enough to that I could take pictures of. Sorry this first picture is a little dark.
This is the snake pit that was next to the Longest Snake Contest. There were several men who were grabbing snakes with long hooks and putting them on a table to measure them. The longest snakes were being separated and the losers were tossed into big garbage barrels. I don't even want to know their fate.
The longest snakes were placed in these bins. The results are not yet published for this year, but in 2007 the longest snake was 80 inches. The all time Sweetwater record holder was 84 inches long!
This is the snake I saw them measuring when I worked my way through the crowd to get a good photo. This one was only 38 inches long.
Kenny and I were fascinated by the milking pit. This guy was grabbing rattlesnakes out of one barrel by their tails, milking them, then tossing them into another barrel at a rate of about three snakes per minute. He was so fast that I kept trying to take a picture of him and by the time I took the picture I just got a picture of him tossing the snake into the second barrel!
This is the snake handler. He taught a lesson about rattlesnakes and snake safety. Then he teased a snake with a balloon, which I took a video of for your entertainment. I am thinking there must be some animal (or reptile) rights groups out there that would probably not like this.
There were a lot of other things to see, but I had three problems. #1. There were 35,000 other people in Sweetwater with us. Sweetwater is 10.0 square miles. #2. My camera battery was really low so I kept saving it for something really good. And #3. Some of the things I saw were just too yucky!
2 comments:
I was so eagerly awaiting these pictures, but now I'm thinking that I probably could have waited another day or so. Yuck! Kudos to you for walking into that building! I would have been freaking out the whole time! Did the boys (Brian included! :)) love it? You're such a great mom! Is it sometimes hard to believe that you grew up in a small upstate NY town closer to Candada than NYC? Too funny where life has brought you!
Miss you!
JoLee:)
It was ok for the most part, but some of it was a little scary. I had a mini-panic attack as I finished taking the picture of the snake pit. And some of the people around me looked at me like I was a big fat sissy. Also, if you look across some of my pictures you can see that there really isn't a lot of space between the spectators and the snakes. It is a tiny little half-wall thing that I felt like an aggressive snake could have jumped right over! Fortunately for me, my BIO teacher is WAY against these roundups so he talked about it in class last week and he mentioned that the reason they do it in March is that the rattlesnake is slow & sleepy in March (hibernation or something). I wouldn't go to one in July!! Did you click on my "link" at the end where I wrote "too yucky" ? They had a station set up where they were teaching people (kids included) how to skin snakes. Brian took the boys to see it, but I couldn't even make myself get close. It was stinky and just too gross!
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