After visiting my brother's house in Santaquin, I decided to drive a canyon on the way back in hopes of finding a cool snake. This canyon normally has little or no traffic, but I forgot that the bow hunt had just started, so there were a lot of vehicles going in both directions. A lot of these "hunters" are a danger to themselves and everything within their range, so I thought it was best to stay in the car for the most part (I'm not into body piercing). The only snake I would find this night was a recently run-over Yellow Bellied Racer. The person who ran the snake over probably did it intentionally. The bright green is hard to miss and these snakes are almost always moving and the canyon road doesn't allow fast speeds in the area where the snake was killed. Anyone who thinks that they have done the world a favor by running over a snake is an uneducated idiot (that includes people that otherwise seem very intelligent). If it was possible to ask the millions that died in Europe of the plague whether they would have wanted snakes to control their rodent population, I'm sure the answer would be an emphatic "yes". Snakes are very important to the environment. It always disgusts me to see a snake killed on the road, but I guess its less traumatic than finding a person killed on the road. I will have to pick another canyon for my next snake hunt, but right now I can't think of one that won't be full of hunter traffic.
