Pennsylvania Roundup

I'm including extra Pennsylvania news which is sure to please Dirty Uncle J, who was just visiting, and peed in a drain next to my jalapenos. Such a philistine.

1. Fees to be added to Pennsylvania State Parks? Pennsylvania has a very underrated state park system - underrated most of all by Pennsylvanians! And most states don't even HAVE a state forest system. Or game lands. Start valuing it or it will a) get more expensive to maintain like this (due to legislators not wanting to spend tax dollars on it) or b) it will go away.
   
   
2. Cool study showing how ecosystems changed in southeast PA after the arrival of Europeans. Basically, until then, streams branched a lot more and there were richer wetlands. Europeans arrived and dammed things for mills, depositing a lot of silt and channeling the streams into a few bigger ones. I used to look at the landforms around Berks County and wonder how beavers would have been able to survive, but with marshier streams, it makes more sense. The work was done by Dorothy Merritts and Robert Walter at Franklin & Marshall.
   
   
3. Reddit user u/geotolken posts this map on the PA subreddit. S/he is clearly doing important work. I have several crates of Utz products in my garage in California as I type. I don't think many Pennsylvanians realize how thoroughly abnormal and wonderful it is to have basically a snack food manufacturer for every county! I know it's hard to see on here so click here to open in a new tab if you want to see if your favorite one is on there.
   
   
   
   
4. Below, great video of kayak camping on the Delaware. I've only done this once, and was serenaded by foxes all night. So much wilder than people realize. A friend where I now live in California, who grew up here and spent his summers in Yosemite and is quite well-traveled, told me the Delaware Water Gap is one of the most beautiful places he's ever been.
   
   
   
   
5. Daily pH cycle for Loyalsock Creek near Williamsport:
   
   
   
   
6. Bonus Sonoma County California news: laugh it up Pennsylvanians!
   
   
   
   As it does every summer, Sonoma County has caught on fire and at this writing has been burning for two weeks. This set of fires "only" burned 580 square miles (the ones in the Bay Area - the ones in the northern half of the Bay Area anyway) and even though they're mostly out, we basically haven't been able to go outside for two weeks due to the air quality. COVID plus megafire = just really a great time. And to top it off, yes I had my first home-grown jalapeno (pictured, fortunately prior to J's micturative exertions); and of course, it's about the ONLY thing around here that's not hot right now! (Yes it's my first and I was too excited to wait for it to show corking but I don't think that would make its heat more respectable as opposed to the nursing-home-gruel-level it's at.) Below that is our new county seal.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Above: a commentary on experiencing the unexpected mildness of the pepper during the summer of 2020.
   
   

Fires and Terrible State Parks

We recently evacuated due to the Kincade Fire. The text alerts from CalFire and the Sonoma County Sheriff were great, and sorting Twitter by latest for #Kincadefire was also very useful. I have never been this scared or anxious or felt I had so little control - and we got out with family and critters and papers well ahead of when the fire would have come, but waiting to find out if your house burned down is no fun. We love Sonoma County, but we don't love this aspect of it so much. Climate change is giving Sonoma County LA County's weather, and when you already have forests, they burn, which is how the landscape will gradually look more like LA County (or almost instantaneously, geologically speaking.) The natives who preceded people of European descent here set controlled burns every autumn (and this has been witnessed since before contact), but when you have this many people in non-mobile dwellings that can't be rebuilt in mere days, that's not an option. Low humidity plus longer rain-free periods plus heat and bad Diablo winds (our local foehn winds) are how this happens.

So, a thank you to the people who hosted us and our various critters or who offered and were ready; also to the men and women who put themselves on the line to hold this fire. Had it not been for you, many people would have died, and I wouldn't have a house right now. Take a minute to thank a firefighter, buy them a beer, send a card, whatever. There are few people whose work matters more than theirs, especially in California.

If you spend much time on social media, you will notice (especially on Twitter) Russian troll bots taking advantage of Trump's threat to abandon California even while he promises fire aid to Siberia. They do this by trying to stoke the fires of "CalExit", which may be the dumbest thing anyone has ever thought of (give Trump's party a permanent majority in Washington and dividing yet another of Russia's main competitors.) You'll recognize them when you see them - the one I clicked through on was full of pro-Brexit, pro-Catalonia independence messages, while curiously silent on the protests in Hong Kong or independence for Russia's neglected Far East territories. I wonder why? I Twitter-replied to this effect and my reply was deleted within a minute.

The following pictures were taken from China Camp State Park the following weekend. Fire is about 60 miles north at 75% containment but the smoke layer is obvious and Mt. Tam is still quite hazy. Bay pictures are looking east across the very top of the Bay (curved, with mouth of the Napa River) with Mt. Diablo just visible through the smoke layer in one looking southeast toward Richmond.










Next three below: you'll have to forgive my obsession with manzanitas. Their bark is the bubble wrap of the natural world. It peels like that as a defense against fungus; I wonder if, as uniquely woody members of the heather family (see ice plant here), this is more difficult for them than other plants, that have specific endochitinases to kill fungus (rubber trees and mangoes both do, but they're in the wet tropics. Incidentally it's this endochitinase that causes allergic cross-reactivity, ie why people allergic to latex are often also allergic to mangoes.)








Above: this picture was taken from the International Space Station, looking south along the Pacific Coast, with the Kincade Fire plainly visible. Below: fire-smoke sunsets are obscenely pretty.



As it happened, the weekend we evacuated we actually had a pre-planned trip which took us to Southern California, and I had all kinds of runs planned down there and of course while we were there, their local foehn winds came through and everything caught on fire there too. So no running in Topanga State Park for me. Instead I ran in Chino Hills State Park, which is the most useless state park I have been in. A cluster of oaks along the canyon bottom, and then the rest of it just brown curved hills covered with those scratchy sticks that poke you (my shins are still paying the price.) Gross. Feel free to skip these pictures, they suck. If you live there, I hope you didn't have to pay more for your property for living near this "natural resource", which I would put on par with the industrialized part of the North Jersey Meadowlands (and not even with cannoli.) Seriously, it's the ugliest state park in California, hands down. Good points: a) fine, I saw a tarantula (see below) and some wild gourds growing, b) it looks nice in the spring when it's green and you're driving past it, and c) I will never have to go there again before I die. The hikes listed on Nobody Hikes in LA are faint in their praise.

San Diego: Disease-Carrying Ticks in Penasquitos Area

Tularemia-causing organisms detected in ticks on Lopez Canyon Trail. More here.

Getting Lost

The most important thing you might get out of this post is what to do when you're lost; also, because it's more likely you'll be in a search party than lost overnight, how to find other people (based on how they behave) when they get lost. Now that I'm a dad, this has become more important to me. Here is a link to a chapter from Lost Person Behavior by KA Hill. Another book by the same title that is even more frequently recommended is Lost Person Behavior by Robert Koester. I also recommend the master's thesis by Jared Doke available online for Yosemite search-and-rescue incidents, not all of which can necessarily be generalized outside of Yosemite.

This also prompted me to try to list out all the times I was lost. Here I list all the times that I remember being lost (I qualify it this way because those of us who like to think we're competent in the outdoors tend to block out our mis-steps.) I include times when I thought I was lost, which also counts for practical purposes - if you're going the correct way you planned to get where you want to go, but your belief about your position and direction of travel is incorrect, you're still lost - that is, if your belief about where you are and where you actually are don't line up, you won't be able to make good decisions about getting to your destination. The word for that is "lost."

Considering that I go into the great outdoors a lot to some fairly remote places, and favor going to new places over familiar ones, and have poor spatial reasoning, I really haven't gotten lost badly or often. I think this results from a combination of things:

• Since I've been in my early 20s I've consciously and religiously avoided off-trail travel unless absolutely necessary. (In Doke's thesis, going off trail, plus poor planning and communication - a sin I commit in many of my instances below - is the main contributing factor in over half the cases.)
• I know I'm a bad spatial reasoner, but I have a very good verbal memory - so as with most things, my reasoning about trails tends to be explicit and verbal, forcing me to really deliberately study maps ahead of time, announce waypoints to myself, memorize the turns I take and how they look.
• I have forced on myself several experiences to simulate how unpleasant being lost would be; among them, sleeping overnight in a snow cave during winter on the PCT.
• I do my best not to get overconfident, and realize that even on familiar trails, I can (and have) still become lost. Part of why I'm posting this is to organize my experience and make these instances are more salient and available in my mind when I'm making decisions out on trail in the future.
• Finally, my experience hashing has led me to pay extra attention to trails and how they might mislead you, deliberately or othwerwise. (Yes seriously. For example on this fiendishly clever trail I had to go out and look for people. The man who set that trail was a very bad bad man and when I find him I will bring him to justice.)

Times I Got Lost

Location: Sheerlund Forest, Cumru Township, Pennsylvania (Note: which is a commercial Christmas Tree farm where I now know Taylor Swift lived at the time, age 3. No we weren't stalking her, she wasn't famous yet, duh.)
Age: 19
Situation: During a snowstorm at night, a friend led me through deep snow to an old tower in the forest. (Note: the highest per capita search-and-rescue rate in Yosemite is in February and March when the most snow is on the ground.)
Mistake: Going out without proper gear (i.e. in blue jeans), lights, or preparation; considering (but not actually) going off-trail.
Resolution: After debating whether we should try to go back a different way, we just followed our footsteps in the snow.
Total time lost: ~2 hours


Location: Appalachian Trail area, Hamburg, Pennsylvania
Age: 22
Situation: I saw the highest hill in the area and set out to climb it by bushwacking, only to find at the top that I had climbed a smaller hill.
Mistake: I mistakenly assumed that going up in any direction would lead to the highest point, but of course that's only true if the slope you're on happens to be the side of the highest point. (If you're across the valley, it won't be.) Since I couldn't see the landscape, I had no way of correcting my mistake until I got to the top.
Resolution: Descend the way I came and give up since bushwacking sucks
Total time lost: 1 hour (more like just wasted)


Location: Desert west of Tucson, Arizona
Age: 24
Situation: On a business trip, I had time to visit a college friend and we went for a trail run in the Sonoran Desert.
Mistake: Friend had read about this trail but never been on it and we did not take a map, and had minimal or no water. In August. In Arizona.
Resolution: We tried the viewpoint strategy described in Hill, and tried to contain our panic when even from the top of a prominent peak we could find no sign of civilization. (I tried and failed to find a free video link to Cheech and Chong's Things Are Tough All Over where they also do some unsuccessful desert viewpoint finding and scream into the void, "We are in the middle of f---ing nowhere!") Based on his memory of the area my friend guessed that there was a golf course to our east, and after another hour, much to our relief we stumbled out of the sand and rocks onto the fairway, where the sprinklers were on - and shut off just as we ran toward them. (At this point I checked to be sure my name wasn't Sisyphus.) I got a bad sunburn and ended up missing my flight to my next destination, and when I finally arrived, I very professionally explained to the people I worked with there that I had been lost in the desert.
Total time lost: ~2 hours


Location: North face of Mt. Shasta
Age: 31
Situation: Tried to summit north face with a friend. After camping below the crevasse and not attempting the next morning for various reasons, as we descended we realized that the area at treeline was not the one we had emerged from on the way up.
Mistake: Descending an unfamiliar face of the mountain by a different route than we came up.
Resolution: We used the direction-sampling strategy described in Hill, setting our packs down in a spot we very carefully got waypoints for, so we could descend various sides of the hill we were on until we found either a creekbed that we could follow out or found the route we took up. We found the route we took up and descended that with no further problem. (Note: local terrain and climate matter in terms of optimal general strategies. Following a stream on the simple topography of a prominent stratovolcano is probably a decent general strategy to get you out of the wildnerness, but as K.A. Hill points out, following a stream in Nova Scotia is more likely than not to put you in a remote swamp far from civilization.)
Total time lost: 1 hour


Notice that everything from here on out - 5 instances - is on or around the Western States Trail, some of them during my run across California. I live nearby and run on them a lot, and it still happens! I can't blame Jim Walmsley for getting lost!

Location: Western States Trail Between Miller's Defeat and Last Chance, Sierras, Northern California
Age: 41
Situation: I got off on one of the many unmarked-on-the-map side trails.
Mistake: Not taking a map or GPS.
Resolution: Thank goodness that despite not having cell reception, the GPS locator on my Android still worked, and I continued on the (possibly unofficial) trail I was on. My wife was waiting for me at the trailhead and was about 20 minutes away from driving away from the trailhead to a spot where she had cell reception and could call 911. Long-term resolution was she made me get a satellite-based texting device, which is roughly the same cost as a GPS device but not nearly as much as a satellite phone.
Total time lost: 2 hours


Location: Western States Trail Between Duncan Canyon to Robinson Flat, Sierras, Northern California
Age: 41
Situation: I was actually on the true trail but didn't believe I was.
Mistake: Not having any way to verify whether I was on trail (GPS, etc.)
Resolution: Despite thinking I was lost, I continued on the trail. When I got to the top of the canyon-side I became convinced that I was completely lost, and at one point lost control and started shouting curses. Of course 100 yards later I came into the back of Robinson Flat Campground, mortified that people might have heard me both due to the nastiness of what I was shouting and their seeing me lose control of myself. The shame of it is that the river in that canyon is the most beautiful mountain stream I've ever seen but I ruined it for myself.
Total time lost: none, but believed I was lost for about 1 hour


Location: Auburn area trails between Maidu Drive and Black Hole of Calcutta Falls, Sierra Foothills, Northern California
Age: 42-45 (three times!)
Situation: Getting on the wrong trails as I tried to return to Maidu Drive
Mistake: I made a wrong turn, I think always too early.
Resolution: It's hard to get really lost since the river provides a foolproof point of orientation. In two cases I retraced my steps successfully and sampled routes until one looked familiar. In another I ended up coming up to the rim of the canyon near Auburn HS, mostly to get to civilization, and running back through the town a couple miles to my car.
Total time lost: 30 min/30 min/1 hour


If I remember other cases or my smart-ass friends kindly remind me, I will return to the post and add them.

Helicopter Rescue, Climbing Rocks at Mission Trails 9/28/14

Red Diamond Rattler: Santa Fe Pond

(I already put this encounter on the rattlesnake map; always at top right on this blog.)

A sign in Lusardi Creek Preserve states that there are red diamond rattlers there, and then about 20 minutes after I saw it, I met one of these guys.


From venombyte.com

If you're familiar with the little pond in Rancho Santa Fe, it was in the basalt rocks on the northern side of the pond. As I ran by I heard a slapping sound, and as I looked over on the rock next to me, this fine fellow had just dropped itself down from a rock higher up, onto a rock maybe two feet to my right. I leaped into a sprint, then stopped and turned back. It had taken on a threat posture but wasn't rattling. It didn't have many beads on its tail so it was young. From a safe distance I tossed a few very small little sticks and pieces of bark onto it to get it to rattle but it wouldn't. As I've seen other rattlers do, when it realized all its posturing wasn't making me go away, it flattened itself and played dead, and I left the poor guy alone. A family had just arrived to play in the pond and I made sure to warn them where I saw it, then went about my running business.

I looked up the species to see how much trouble I would have been in if it bit me. Rattlers' venom chemistry is always interesting. I had once been very puzzled that most rattlesnakes have hemorrhagic venom (for your biomedical types, it's a hack of the arginine-glycine-aspartate motif in the IIb-IIIa system on platelets) but Mojave rattlers have neurotoxic venom. This didn't make sense. Evolution works by adapting structures that living things already have to new purposes, not by magically developing things that fit into the same abstract function of a structure. For example: flying squirrels have a membrane between their arms and legs. Birds have given up their entire arm and now use them as wings. It's not like suddenly squirrels will switch from having skin between arms and legs, to having their arms as wings, just because they want to continue improving their flying. By the same token, a snake can't wake up one morning and say, "You know, I like being able to kill things by biting them, but instead of just making them bleed to death internally, I'd really like to paralyze them or make them seize. So I'll just concentrate really hard - there we go - and start making neurotoxic venom instead." So how can a snake with hemorrhagic venom be related to one with neurotoxic venom? (I once emailed an Australian snake venom expert but he didn't write back. Maybe he was insulted at being consulted about wussy American snake venoms.)

The answer is that like most things in nature, venoms are not pure suspensions of a single component. There are a whole bunch of compounds in snake venom and one or a few may get magnified if they're more effective at hurting certain prey in the right way. So most rattlers have a predominantly hemorrhagic venom, and some have a predominantly neurotoxic venom. This shouldn't be so shocking - some humans can produce two different varieties of the same protein (ever have a male friend who had dark hair but a red beard?) And it turns out even within species there are variants. From the Wiki article on red diamonds:

...Norris (2004) warned this species has a relatively large venom yield containing high levels of proteolytic enzymes, especially in the adults. A publication he mentions by Rael et al. (1986) showed it contains at least three proteolytic hemorrhagins that degrade fibrinogen and cause myonecrosis, but no Mojave toxin. On the other hand, three specimens from Mexico studied by Glen et al. (1983) did have Mojave toxin and lacked hemorrhagic activity.

Then again it may be that there are isomorphs that make identification by skin alone difficult (tiger snakes in Australia are one example), and that Glen paper from 1983 cited in the red diamond article from 1983 preceded PCR and easy DNA identification. That said, the one I saw did have the very prominent black and white banding on the tail. There's a more detailed discussion in the Mojave rattler article:

All rattlesnake venoms are complex cocktails of enzymes and other proteins that vary greatly in composition and effects, not only between species, but also between geographic populations within the same species. C. scutulatus is widely regarded as producing one of the most toxic snake venoms in the New World, based on LD50 studies in laboratory mice. Their potent venom is the result of a presynaptic neurotoxin composed of two distinct peptide subunits. The basic subunit (a phospholipase A2) is mildly toxic and apparently rather common in North American rattlesnake venoms. The less common acidic subunit is not toxic by itself, but in combination with the basic subunit, produces the potent neurotoxin called "Mojave toxin". Nearly identical neurotoxins have been discovered in five North American rattlesnake species besides C. scutulatus.[17] However, not all populations express both subunits. The venom of many Mojave rattlesnakes from south-central Arizona lacks the acidic subunit and has been designated "venom B," while Mojave rattlesnakes tested from all other areas express both subunits and have been designated "venom A" populations.

Why Did the Mountain Lion Pick This Woman?

What's disturbing about this is that it seems to have chosen her because of her size - mountain lions are attracted to pets and children for this reason - which means it must have taken its time casing the neighborhood before it came into her house.



Mountain lions will be confirmed in Pennsylvania by 2025. Anyone want to bet against me on this? (No takers so far.)

Firsthand Encounter With a Grow Operation

Another blogger posts his experience with a grow operation, ruining Los Padres National Forest. These introduce invasives, cause erosion, reroute scarce water and dramatically increase fire danger, not to mention personal danger from growers who may be carrying weapons. This has been a problem everywhere but particularly in Los Padres, as you can read here.

Why is this going on? Because we've created a black market. When you can grow and buy it legally, like you now can in Colorado and Washington (where civilization is still chugging along just fine), there's no incentive to do wilderness-damaging stuff like this.

Next time legalization is on the ballot...here's yet another reason to vote Yes. Conservation. Take these guys' market away from them.

Add Your Own Close Calls: The Rattlesnake Encounter Map

View Rattlesnake Encounters in San Diego County in a larger map

Clicking on that nasty-looking reptile you see to the right will take you to the map you see above, which is a public-access Google map for people to mark rattlesnake encounters in San Diego County. My purpose in putting this together was to get an idea if there were certain spots where people routinely encountered snakes outdoors. It's been up for a little over a year and a half and as of today there are 15 encounters on it; so far it hasn't been enough to show if there are any hotspots. But either way, I appreciate the contributors!

I'm going to leave it up (and linked on this blog) but probably won't plug it again. So, if you see one of these critters out there, or someone mentions to you that they have, you can tell them to do a Google search for "rattlesnake encounter map" and they'll find it. Hey, if it helps one less person get bitten by a snake, it's worthwhile.

What Are the Odds of Getting Assaulted While Running?

For all trailrunners' worries about mountain lions and other critters, the scariest animal we're likely to meet is (drum roll) an ill-intentioned human - but how likely is that? Since in the U.S. we just set the clocks back an hour, after-work runs are going to be in the dark until March. So, Science Based Running tries to calculate the odds. The answer is we still don't know, because crime stats aren't collected that way. That said, violent crime in the U.S. is about as low as it's ever been.

Here are safety tips for running at night, and here's a mapping site that plots crimes by type over the last six months.

Mt. Laguna Burn Report

A good article with lots of photos at the OB Rag. In terms of forest damage, fortunately, not that bad. Thanks to Frank Gormlie for going up there and sharing this with the community.

Angeles Crest 100 2013

No I didn't run it. I thought about going up to pace but ended up not being able to leave San Diego that day due to other commitments (medicine sucks.) But I was very happy to run across this nice vid done by Chihping Fu, who I had met in the trail/ultra community when I was still up in SF. Super nice guy and glad to see him here. Enjoy! I should also add it seems like the post-race tradition is now to go to Din Tai Fung in Arcadia. Great, now when I hit that place one the way back from Angeles N.F. I'll feel guilty for not having just finished a 100-miler. Yeah, thanks guys! :)

Beware, as of this writing (9 August 2013) there is a fire burning in the northeastern part of Angeles N.F. (Lone Pine Canyon) that has caused some evacuations in Wrightwood, and may be changing this guy's plans for the weekend.

San Diego Cyclists Being Shot at by Loser Kids

San Diego cyclists are being targeted by jerks with a pellet gun. (From bikesd.org.) People have been shot at with pellets - the kind that can penetrate skin - in La Jolla, up on Mount Soledad, around Torrey Pines, and on Fiesta Island. This has happened over multiple days. Police are investigating. The report says that they were three teenagers driving a black Grand Am.

If you see them, GET THE PLATE NUMBER (always obvious in retrospect) and even better, get a picture, then call 911.

Info On the Mountain Fire

Just wanted to link to Gary Valle's information on the Mountain Fire, from 2:54 PM local time Thursday 18 July. You might say "it's 2 days old even when you're posting it" but Valle's post is still the most up-to-date, complete, useful piece of reporting I've seen about the fire. As has been the case for big SoCal forest fires since I've moved here.

Chariot Fire Damage at Mount Laguna

As of this writing (18:23 10 July 2013) there is no active fire anymore, just a lot of smouldering. The cooler overcast weather today helped the firefighters. But the damage is done, to both to the beautiful forest at Mt. Laguna and the campsites:


View California Fire Map in a larger map

As always, thanks to the firefighters who keep us safe. And no disrespect to the organizations that lost property and memories up there, but it's the loss of some of San Diego County's very rare forest that hurts the most.

Today I noticed the damage from the fire that happened a few weeks ago at 52 and Santo Road. Is your fire kit and evac plan ready?

Mission Trails Closed 6/17/13 Due to Fire

This was at 52 and Santo Road in Tierra Santa. Thanks to the professionals of the SDPD for knocking this one down. There was just one two weeks ago in Rose Canyon.

Fire season starts in June now! Is your kit and evac plan ready?



The Witch Fire near Scripps Ranch, 2007. From the San Diego Wildfires Education Project.

Brush Fire Friday in Rose Canyon

Along the south-side trail in the canyon, just west of the Regents Road trail. I went running there Saturday morning. You can actually smell the burn before you see it. Looks like less than an acre.

This could've been much worse. There have been big fires burning in California for most of the last month. Are you ready to evacuate if you have to? (Here's how to put together an evacuation kit.) If you live in SoCal, it's much more likely that you'll be displaced by a fire than an earthquake.

Thanks to the crew who got there so quickly and put it out so effectively, and to the people who saw it and called it in.

The Rattlesnakes Are Out

Multiple bites of people and pets in San Diego County these last few weeks. I haven't seen one yet this year but a lot of runners and traily types I know have. Be careful!

Of note, the Fire Chief in the article repeats a kind of urban myth about snakes, which is that baby snakes inject more venom than adults. There's really no evidence for this, just a lot of people repeating it without proof. And the bottom line anyway is how it affects your decision-making - you don't want to get bitten by a rattlesnake, young, old, teenager, in mild-life crisis, period.

So do your best to avoid them, and know what to do if you or someone around you does get bitten: stay calm (don't panic or run), call 911, and get yourself to a hospital. No sucking out the poison or tourniquets! (More here.)


Seen one of these? Put it on the San Diego Rattlesnake Encounter Map (always on the right side of the screen on this blog, or click here). Help build the database!

Alternative Transport in San Diego: Bike and Horse

1) There is a plan to connect the Route 56 bike corridor to UTC - without making people ride along I-5 with no barrier protection, as is the case now. Unfortunately we're looking at >2 years to complete it. More here.

2) The Border Patrol uses horses to patrol at the Imperial Beach/San Ysidro border. Yes, there is Customs cavalry. I just thought this was an interesting story.

Yet Another Baby Rattler

Shouldn't be surprising after this hot summer, but I saw another one, this one up in Carlsbad. I've been seeing them all around 630pm on sandy/dusty sections of trail adjacent to grassy areas.

Have you seen one too? Add your encounter to the rattlesnake map! (Below.) Plus it's always available at right if you click on the snake.


View Rattlesnake Encounters in San Diego County in a larger map