I’ve never been a fan of snakes, regardless of the species or potency of the bite.
For several years before returning to the Flathead Valley I lived with my faithful husky mix in a secluded log cabin atop Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where I checked “country editor” of a small-town newspaper off my bucket list.
Our closest neighbors in those thick woods consisted of black bears, bobcats, coyotes, deer, foxes, ticks and snakes—the latter two creatures by far the most vicious.
Sadly, Luna and I speak from experience.
For starters, I contracted the life-threatening, life-altering and incurable “alpha-gal syndrome,” having been gnawed all night by an impalpable lone star tick that crawled beneath my covers.
As a result, I can no longer consume any red meat or their derivatives—beef, pork, lamb, elk, venison, broth, milk, cream, butter—without going into anaphylactic shock. Needless to say I’ve moved down on the dinner guest list.
As prevalent and potentially lethal as the ticks are—you may recall former U.S. Sen Kay Hagan passed away five years ago of the tick-borne Powassan virus after being bitten in the same Virginia mountains during a Thanksgiving hike—I came to detest snakes the most.
From the oily rat snakes that would slither out from under my kitchen stove (I never did pinpoint their passageways), to the unidentified (it was pitch dark) serpent that awakened me in the middle of the night after becoming entangled in my bedroom blinds—only to lather my Pendleton wool blanket with a foul-smelling defensive “musk” secretion before vanishing (I spent the remainder of the night upright in my truck)—to the nocuous copperheads and rattlesnakes that lied in wait outside the front door.
When she wasn’t treeing bears, Luna all too often would go head-to-head with the lunging copperheads, described by a top herpetologist as “mobile ambush predators.” And while their strike is incredibly fast (copperheads inflict more bites in this country than any other snake species) Luna luckily never got bit.
By a copperhead, that is.
It was late October when I dropped by the county extension office seeking advice on a noisy timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus) that lingered under the cabin’s front porch. The agent surmised that recent heavy rains had flooded the snake’s den and recommended I leave it alone (as if I was going to try to remove it) until things dried out. At which time it should move along.
That time never came. One moonlit night as I stood at the front door fumbling for my keys, the rattler thrust its triangular head through the porch lattice and sank its fangs into Luna’s leg. She would survive, thank God, but only after being hooked up to an IV for two days (I previously lost a yellow Lab to a festering snake bite inflicted in the subtropical suburbs of Washington, DC).
I recall these unpleasant memories after opening the July-August 2025 issue of Montana Outdoors, its cover story: “Not a Dog’s Chance: How to Protect your Pooch from Rattlers.”
Not that we need to worry about rattlesnakes in the Flathead, right? After all, it wasn’t terribly long ago that old-timers here boasted everywhere “north of Elmo” was venom free.
Apparently not anymore.
Two summers ago, for instance, a construction worker revealed that his crew had bulldozed into a nest of prairie rattlesnakes (Crotalus viridis) at a new home site above Lakeside. And only last week a Bigfork resident, whose home overlooks the “Wild Mile,” shooed a juvenile rattlesnake away from his yard. It was the first time he’d seen a pit viper on his property.
And there have been other rattlesnake encounters in these parts, as told on social media.
A revised 2023 map of the “range of the prairie rattlesnake,” produced by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the Montana Department of Agriculture, shows Montana’s lone venomous snake inhabits the entirety of this state except the eastern half of the Flathead Valley, Glacier National Park, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, the eastern shore of Flathead Lake, and the Swan Valley south to around Seeley Lake.
Otherwise, given our warming climate, everywhere west of Highway 93—places like Rhodes Draw, West Valley and Kila, as well as the entire west shore of Flathead Lake to Somers—is now labeled as rattlesnake habitat, according to the map.
Which doesn’t mean a prairie rattlesnake is ready to strike in your back yard, let alone lives there. In fact, this particular viper is quite docile and will only bite a human as a last resort, like if a hand suddenly reaches into a flower bed to pull a weed (happened to a friend of mine back in Virginia), or stepping on a rattler that’s sunning itself in tall grass. Most important to remember, all snakes are good for the environment.
And you can have every last one of them.
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.