Our plan, much amended, was to spend part of the last day visiting the Snake Road in southern Illinois. We packed up and left Tennessee behind, driving north into the evening. Driving down the gravel road towards the Pine Hills campground, I noticed that Jim had stopped his truck behind me, and when I backed up, I found out why. In the lead car, I had ran over an adult Copperhead crossing the road.

I never saw the snake. Tired, anxious to end the drive in a few hundred feet, I wasn't paying close attention. It was a hard moment - killing such a serpent, even accidentally, has no place in a lifetime spent searching for and admiring these creatures. Jeff and Jim were sympathetic, and I appreciated their support, while I tried to deal with what happened. Determined to have some good come out of this tragedy, I bagged up the snake and put it on ice. After returning home I took the snake in to the Illinois Natural History Survey for preservation and use in a genetic study.

Jeff was not happy with his Leopard Frog footage from the previous night, and wanted to get more, so the three of us drove down to Winter's Pond. It was after midnight, and some Leopards were calling over by the levee and Jeff headed off in that direction. Jim and I walked down the Snake Road for a little bit, kicking up a few frogs and a Yellowbellied Water Snake. We were pretty tired, and went back to the truck and dozed while the patient and hard-core video-frographer crouched in the muck and filmed calling frogs. I don't know how long we waited, but Jeff was pretty happy with the results, and that's really what matters.

We slept in for a bit the next morning, and I tossed together one more big breakfast, using up the last of the Tennessee sausage patties and another round of Big-Assed Flapjacks. I ate more sausage on this trip than I would normally eat in a year, but hey, we burned up all of those fat calories during the day.

We broke camp, and photographed a Gray Tree Frog that one of the other guys found hopping about the place last night. We were not in a big hurry, as the sun wouldn't start poking over the bluffs until ten o'clock or so...