I was riding with my buddy Roger Repp, who was leading a carful of Chicago Herpetological Society friends towards one of his favorite Crotalus cerberus spots. Hey! What's that in the road! It's a couple of young men wrangling a Crotalus cerberus! We pulled over to check out their find and chatted with them a little. One was from the Kansas Herpetological Society, and the other was a friend of his from South Carolina. For ten or fifteen minutes there were snake fans from across the country admiring this one wary reptile.

Ninety minutes later or so, Roger, the Chicago folks, and I were on foot, scattered around in search of more of these interesting snakes. I heard a shout in the distance and homed in on its source to learn that Chicagoan Ralph Shepstone had spotted this fine snake. I had been told that this is a relatively mellow rattlesnake species, and this one allowed a bunch of people to take its photo without much complaint.

Roger Repp and I joined Melissa Amarello and Jeff Smith for a weekend of searching for Crotalus cerberus, which Melissa was studying for her doctoral thesis. Jeff had used Google Earth to pick out a canyon that looked like promising habitat, in an area where they had found these snakes before. We arrived in the late afternoon and had searched for an hour or so without finding what we were looking for, though Roger did find a nice Crotalus atrox and I found an attractive lizard or two.

Just after we called it quits and turned to head back to the car, Jeff noticed this fine fellow slithering across the trail a few feet in front of us. The last photo here shows Jeff and Melissa taking actual data, while Roger poses goofily in the foreground.

Here are a couple more Crotalus cerberus found by our gang the next day. I made myself useful among my more experienced and knowledgeable fellow snake seekers by being lucky enough to notice the second one above as it crossed a small stream. Jeff Smith found the first one.

This was the final cerberus of my cerberus-filled trip to the Tucson area. Jeff Smith somehow spotted this one through fairly dense vegetation, coiled up tight at a shallow angle.