Another chilly night, with overcast skies the next morning. We were pulling up stakes and heading back towards Louisville. But first, we had a few pictures to take. Jeff had turned up a Black Mountain Salamander in the creek just a few feet away from our campsite, and we also needed shots of the Milk Snake and the Black King.

Then it was time to head back west, and we drove into a light drizzle. We revisited a couple board lines from the first days of our trip, and one hillside yielded a Black Rat Snake and a Black King, both adults. The Rat Snake had eaten an enormous meal, a small rabbit or a squirrel perhaps, so we handled it quickly and gently, just long enough to get a couple pictures. There's no sense in having a snake regurgitate a hard-won meal. The Black King was a large adult, and another nice-looking one. We were glad to see both, given the chilly temperatures and the rain.

Our next stop was an old abandoned house, which yielded a few Ringnecks and an Eastern Garter Snake. The Ringnecks on this trip were a motley assortment of ventral patterns - plain bellies, scatttered spots, and clean lines of half-moons down the center. At this spot I took a few pictures of one of the latter. The Kentucky sirtalis had been handsome animals for the most part, and this youngster was no exception.

At an old barn we flipped a section of corrugated roofing and found another Garter, a big female. We figured that, like the females found along the power line cut, she was taking advantage of the radiant heat under that metal to grow some young.

Nearing Louisville, we decided to stop and revisit one of the places from our second day in Kentucky. Jeff had missed out on the Mud Salamander, and since the weather was decidedly more friendly to salamanders than snakes, we shifted gears. We split up, working along the small trickles running on either side of the road.  Jeff turned up a salamander under a large flat rock, which left us a bit puzzled, since it was built like a Mud Salamander, but was very pale under the low light conditions. Taking flash pictures pulled out the true colors of this salamander, but it was nowhere near as brilliant as the one I had found earlier in the trip.

Speaking of which...I wondered. Since we were close by, we walked up the road a bit and found the bit of log next to the road...the salamander was still there, five days later! Now we could compare Jeff's find to my recapture. In the meantime, Jim had been neither idle or unlucky, and had found a third Muddie, under an old wheel rim by the roadside. This one was different from the other two, being a much darker orange, almost red, with larger and darker spots. This species starts out its adult life with brilliant colors that darken and fade with age; it looked like we managed to find maiden, mother and crone in one fell swoop.

We lost the light, and it was time for us to head for home, albeit a day early. Cold and rain were to sweep across the Midwest for another day, and we could see no point in continuing...