MotoFoto.cc

Motorcycle Photography

Home    Motors    Travel Photos     Publications    Links    Contact Us

The Sweetwater Rattlesnake
Roundup

March 2006

It was the right question to ask.  Everyone started talking about the Rattlesnake Roundup, becoming more excited with each comment.  The Roundup, they explained, is kind of like a bass-fishing contest.  "The boy who won the Roundup last year brought in nearly 3500 pounds of rattlers..." one of my hosts exclaimed.

I was stunned.  In four years of crashing around the Texas desert in APCs and jeeps, I had seen exactly three rattlesnakes, and they weren't very big ones at that. 

"How can you find 3500 pounds of snakes in a day?" I asked.

"Well, we strip mine the gypsum," one of the fellows told me.  "Our boys just bulldoze up major parts of the earth.  Every once in a while, one of these old boys will turn up a snake den," he said in a conspiratorial whisper.  "They look around to make sure no one else has seen them, they mark the location, they cover it back up, and then when the Roundup rolls around, they know exactly where to go..."

You could have knocked me over with a feather.  I had no idea such things even existed.  Suddenly, all the rattlesnake kitsch I had seen but not really noticed at the plant and even at the restaurant's cash register (belts, belt buckles, bolo ties, hats...all based on rattlesnake skins, rattlesnake heads, and rattlesnake fangs) started to make sense.  

I realized three things simultaneously:   Sweetwater was not a town for a Jewish boy from New Jersey (that would be me), these people were seriously into rattlesnakes, and at some point in my life I had to get back to Sweetwater to see the Rattlesnake Roundup.

That interview with US Gypsum was in 1977.  I told the above story recently one night during dinner, and my friend Marty listened carefully.  Marty is paid to be a good listener (and he is), but I could see he was far more attentive to this story.   After dinner my wife and I dropped Marty and his wife off at their home.  By the time I got home and checked my e-mail, I had a note from Marty.  Marty had already found the Rattlesnake Roundup on the Internet.  Marty suggested it would make for a good motorcycle ride. 

So, here we go....

Sweetwater is about 200 miles west of Fort Worth.  It's also about 1200 miles east of Los Angeles, or two days by motorcycle. Two long, boring days of droning along I-10 for 1000 miles, and then I-20 for the last 200 miles.

As the photo below shows, though, there are a lot of rattlesnakes still out there.

My first thought when I saw this pen, right inside the coliseum, is here's a nightmare waiting to happen!

These are Western Diamondback rattlesnakes.

The handlers were impressive.  They took the live snakes around to the spectators and allowed you to touch them.

The Roundup ran like a production line.  The snakes came in, they were weighed, they were milked for their venom, they were slaughtered, they were butchered, and then the skins and the meat went their separate ways.  

All of this was done right in front of the spectators.  This was definitely not a place for the squeamish.

One of the spectators asked the inevitable question:  "How many times have you been bit?"

Both of the handlers we saw in this pit said they had never been bitten.

Another spectator asked how long it took the snakes to replace their venom.

"About two weeks," one of the handlers answered, "but these boys ain't got two weeks..."

Look at those fangs!  They are about 3/4 of an inch long.  

Check out the rear-slanting teeth, too!  It would be pretty hard to break free of that grip.

The largest Western Diamondback ever brought in to the Roundup was 81 inches long!  That's just under 7 feet!

This shot used the Sigma 70-300 Macro lens, which works amazingly well on the D70.

Note the pit just behind the snake's nostrils.   That's how it senses heat.

The look on this young lady's face was pretty typical of the reaction from every one at the Roundup.  

I think every one there felt like this young guy looked.  The whole thing was fascinating.

This is Miss Snake Charmer 2006.

Mr. Sager said that a road runner will tease the snake to strike repeatedly, and ultimately, the snake will tire and simply coil up.  When it does this, the road runner then pecks at the snake's head, until the snake puts its head under its coils.  At that point, the snake becomes docile, allowing the road runner to strut around and even climb on top of it.

Mr. Sager induced the snake's reaction by lightly pecking at this snake's head with a snake-handling rod (to duplicate a road runner).   Once the snake had coiled, he picked it up in his bare hand!  That's the snake's head peeking out on the right side of this photo.

"I told him I needed the frog more than he did, so I took it from the snake, put it on my hook, and cast it into the lake.  I felt guilty about stealing the snake's dinner, so I opened his mouth and poured some of my Coors down his throat.  A few minutes later, I felt this king snake rubbing along my leg again.  He had another frog for me...."

Their strike is very fast (faster than you can follow visually).

And yes, those are live rattlers coiled up on the floor.  Every once in a while one would strike at Mr. Sager, who stayed just out of reach and appeared not to be bothered at all.

Yep, we waited in line.

Nope, it does not taste like chicken.

Marty tried one bite and spit it out.

That was enough of a testimonial for me.  I didn't even try it.

We hit I-20 and just kept going.  We both wanted to get out of Texas and stay somewhere in New Mexico to get a jump on the ride for the next day.  We cruised through El Paso at around 8:00 p.m., and stopped in Las Cruces for a quick dinner.  We agreed to we would try to make Lordsburg, New Mexico, that night.

The riding was rough.  It was dusty, dark, very cold, and the wind was awful, probably gusting in excess of 50 or 60 miles per hour.  The bikes were leaning at 30 degrees just to maintain a straight line.

We finally made Lordsburg, only to find that the Days Inn hotel had no vacancies.  You know the drill...you see the sign outside that says "No Vacancy," but you have to go inside and ask anyway.

"Everything is sold out," the lady behind the counter said. "There wasn't an empty room in town last night, either, with all this wind."  What was happening was that all of the truckers were getting off the road due to the high winds.  

We had passed an older motel on the east end of Lordsburg on the way into town.  Willcox, Arizona, was the next stop up the road, but it was 80 miles further west and I knew I couldn't ride another 80 miles in this wind.  We doubled back and tried the older hotel, and we got one of the last rooms.  

"That was a lucky break," Marty and I agreed.  

The next morning...  Well, this picture of our bikes in Lordsburg speaks for itself.   Yep, we were snowed in.   And it was cold.

The Roundup is a bit of a shocker.  Lots of venomous snakes and the butchering was kind of brutal, but it was definitely worth a visit.  And, no matter what anyone says, the myth that rattlesnake tastes like chicken apparently just ain't so.

We were pressed for time, so we droned the entire 2420 miles on the freeway in just 4 days.  The ride was boring (most of our rides are on much more interesting roads), but we did get there and back quickly.  We ran at a pretty good clip most of the time, slowing only when Marty's radar detector lit up or when we needed to stop.

My advice is to do this trip either as one stop on a longer motorcycle journey, or just fly into Abilene (40 miles away) and rent a car or a motorcycle. 

Check out our published work below.  Click on the pictures to learn more about each book...