cherry creek snake street

Got more miles in on my bike last week. I'm even tightening my clipless pedals up. Everything training wise is going well EXCEPT...

why can I not ride ONE FUCKING TIME without seeing a snake?

Saturday was by far my worst snake experience. I was riding on the cherry creek trail, coming around a blind turn, when I saw, just a few feet away, a GIANT snake. I mean that fucker was so long and so thick that it was stretched across the trail and still had part of its body coiled in the grass. If that snake could stand up it would have an NBA contract. Well, it would also need prosthetic arms, but you get the idea.

I couldn't swerve to the left of it because I would have run over its body coil and probably wrecked. I couldn't swerve to the right of it because then I would have been close to its mouth. So I ran it over. It was like hopping a curb. The snake's head reared up at me even though I yelled "sorry about that!" as I ran it over.

Now, you are probably wondering the same thing I wondered. Why was this snake crossing the bike trail? His starting point was next to the creek, with plenty of sunny rocks, and nice trees, and other bushes and shit where he could hang out and not be seen by me. Instead he was crossing the trail to a gravel area that had dog shit  and trash in it and which then led to a parking lot. Not exactly snake nirvana. (note to denverites, this happened near the cherry creek mall, so many reasons to never go to the mall, and now I have another one)

So, unless that snake had a car and somewhere to go in it, or was hoping to hitch a ride to Wyoming or somewhere that's far away from me, he had no reason to cross that trail other than to torment me (I should mention the "trail" is a really wide sidewalk, so you can't claim the snake didn't realize it was a trail for humans and not snakes). He couldn't have been trying to get positive attention, like "oh look, there's a cute snake!" because he was too big to be cute (if you consider small snakes cute - probably no one does because they would be called something like "puppy" or "kitten" - I don't know, maybe they would be called "snakey" if they were cute when they were little).

A guy coming the other direction ran the snake over again but the snake persisted in crossing the trail. I actually had my phone with me and part of my brain was like "you REALLY need to take a picture and you can stand 20 feet away where you're safe" but the other part of my brain was like "DAMN IT! WHY did you ride on all those hills KNOWING THERE MIGHT BE A SNAKE ON THE TRAIL AND THAT YOU'D HAVE TO GET AWAY FROM IT???? PEDAL YOU FUCK BEFORE THE SNAKE GETS US! PEDDDDDDAAAAALLLLL!!!!!" That part of my brain won.

Given that the bike trail is wide enough for 3 bikes to ride comfortably abreast, and that at least 1/4 of the snake was still coiled up on the side of the trail, I would estimate the size of the snake to be REALLY FUCKING BIG. The snake was yellowish with a brown box like pattern on its back. I tried looking at a web site to see if I could identify the snake but after looking at a few pictures I decided to let my dad maybe figure out what snake it was as I can't take the trauma of looking at snake pictures anymore.