We must have walked right by the next snake coming in, but with our eyes to the ground, and this snake being chest high, I suppose we had an excuse. I don't know how many neonate Blackies I've seen stretched straight across some narrow crack in the rock, but it's more than a few, and here was one more. A couple of the adult Black Rat Snakes were still out on the rock face, but Timbers Two and Three had moved on.

Coming around the corner of a section of rock, we spotted another new snake, and it was an impressive sight. A large adult Copperhead was just beginning a vertical ascent of the rock face, just underneath a dead tree trunk leaning against the bluff. Aagh! I got too close in my desire to capture this on film, and the snake spotted me and dropped down into a coil in the leaves. I really didn't want to disrupt the animal's intentions like that. Moving on after a few pictures, I hoped the serpent would pick up where it had left off; it was a magnificent Copperhead, to be sure.

Not long after we spotted another Copperhead, a yearling perhaps, crawling towards a large vertical crack. Our fourth Copperhead of the day was heading for home and perhaps the season of sleep. Nearby I found another neonate Black Rat, this one with a pleasingly aberrant dorsal pattern, coupled with a strong contrast between dark blotches and light gray background. A very pretty little snake.

Our last Black Rat was the tenth one of the day, a young adult crawling along the bluff base. One Cottonmouth for the day seemed unusual, but we soon doubled that number, coming across a robust thirty inch specimen. This handsome snake was nicely banded; usually moccasins this size have faded to a dull black with little or no dorsal pattern left. It delighted us further by coiling and gaping for us in typical piscivorus fashion.

We weren't done yet. The snake highway next yielded a nice Rough Green Snake, this one with a smear of clay across the top of its head, pointing to having been denned down already, and perhaps lured back to the surface by the sun's warmth.