We stopped in Tombstone for lunch at Big Nosed Kate's Saloon. If you like dark saloons dripping with ancient history, and your meals served by waitresses dressed in dance hall girl costumes bedecked with sequins and sporting plunging necklines, well, you'd like Big Nosed Kate's. If one caught a glimpse of Kate's shade, perhaps behind the bar, I'm sure she would be smiling...

We pulled in to Sierra Vista and looked for lodgings. Not the top end hotels, mind you, but not the cheapest either. The cheapest usually come with an assortment of critters and other organisms, all at no extra charge. We finally settled on a place over near the Fort Huachuca gates, dumped our non-essential luggage, and headed back out to get in some road cruising. Waiting for dark, we drove up a canyon road as far was we could get in our rental car, and watched the thunderstorms dump rain on Sierra Vista below.

There seemed to be a lot of folks out on the little two-lanes at night, but we finally found a series of quiet roads to work, some asphalt and others packed dirt. We found two DOR Diamondback neonates on the asphalt road, to start things off on a sour note, but the next little snake was alive! A neonate Mojave, and it had us scratching our heads a little bit. The black and white tail rings looked more like an atrox from one side, but from another view the white rings were wider than the black ones. However, there were two large scales separating the supraoculars, confirming it as a scutulatus.

In many places the low areas along the road were filled with water from the torrential rains, and as we passed we could hear the nasal call of Couch's Spadefoot Toads. We stopped to have a closer look and spotted a number of males calling from the water. I wanted to get a picture of one calling, but every time we shined a flashlight directly on the toad, it would cease. These little guys weren't comfortable in performing their liebspiel under a spotlight and with an audience. No females were in evidence, although we found several on the roads, perhaps en route to a male's evening performance. Female couchii are much prettier than males, having more of a reticulated and contrasting pattern.

We couldn't stay out too late; we had a huge hike ahead of us in the morning, so we headed home around midnight or so. Our last herp of the evening was a half-grown Sonoran Gopher Snake, and once we got our hands on the animal it became evident that it had been hit on the road, even thought there was not a mark on it. Every DOR herp is just a damned shame and a waste of a fine animal; our only consolation over this animal was the thousands of gopher snakes crawling around in the dark far from any road. We left this snake far away from the road and to whatever fate lay ahead.