Watch your step!
Blue Hills hiker has run-in with rattlesnake
She was just out for her weekly walk at the Blue Hills Reservation, on a trail she knows so well she no longer needs a map, and as she lifted her foot to take her next step, she saw it.
“About 12 inches away was probably the biggest snake I’ve ever seen,” said Sarah Kleinman, 45. “It was about 5 feet long, and it looked far from home to me. The whole time I was thinking: It must have escaped from the Franklin Park Zoo.”
She stopped, walked backward about 10 feet as quickly as she could and then noticed the rattle on the end of its tail.
“But it didn’t rattle,” Kleinman said, “so maybe it didn’t feel threatened by me.”
She had to save this moment for posterity, so she took out her phone to take a photo and video of it.
“It wasn’t moving, so I thought it might be dead. But then it began to slither away” Kleinman said. “Because it was so long, it took awhile for it to cross the path.”
Even once it was gone, she was too afraid to continue on the trail, so she decided to take a different route out.
Once she got home, she shared what she had seen with a park ranger, who told her it was a timber rattlesnake, the most critically imperiled reptile in the state, so endangered that it is illegal to harm or even disturb one, according to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.
Historically, it was native to at least ten of Massachusetts’ 14 counties, but over the last 150 years, it has sustained the largest decline of any native reptile.
Today, timber rattlesnakes are found in only the Blue Hills and four other mountainous areas in Massachusetts.
So the fact that the one Kleinman saw was so long was a sign that it was healthy and thriving, and a lucky find, the ranger told her, because the breed usually stays away from people.
“I’m really trying to take to heart and respect what else the ranger told me, that the snakes live here; I’m just a visitor,” she said. “And even though the experience was very surreal and scary, it also was cool to see a snake that big.”
Originally, Kleinman was going to go with a friend and her dog.
“But I’m glad we didn’t because it might have ended very differently,” she said. “The dog might not know the snake was something to stay away from and might have gone to take a closer look.”
Kleinman does plan to go back to the trail, she said, “but next time, I might go with a friend — and without the dog.”
‘The whole time I was thinking: It must have escaped from the Franklin Park Zoo.’ SARAH KLEINMAN