Snake Pit!

Now that we have just over a year left in Texas, I feel the need to get going on my LIST. That is, my list of places to see and do while we are here- my list of "real" Texas experiences. Which explains how we found ourselves surrounded by rattlesnakes. Thousands of rattlesnakes. Angry, rattling, rattlesnakes.

Every year in Sweetwater, TX, thousands of rattlesnakes are rounded up for the aptly named Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup. This is apparently a huge event- with a parade, a carnival, bouncy houses for kids, hundreds of vendors selling whatever you can imagine, and... of course... there are snakes.  There are pits of rattlesnakes everywhere. We watched rattlesnakes being "milked" of their venom:


Sorry for the terrible picture quality. We forgot our good camera. Here you can just barely see that there is a man, holding a rattlesnake, and what he is doing is "milking" the snake of it's venom. The boys thought that this was awesome.



Also, for $20, you could gut and skin your own freshly killed rattlesnake, AND keep the skin! No, we didn't do that. And Owen lost his appetite watching this being done.

Here, these lovely ladies have been handed a freshly killed snake (still wriggling) and they are hanging it on hooks so that a customer can come gut and skin it. Those hand prints on the wall behind? Those are hand prints in snake blood. Yep.

Oh yes. My sweet baby with a fresh snake skin. See how he's leaning away from it??

Oh, boy, what else did we see? There was a man who got into one of the pits (with protective gear, thank goodness), and there must have been 500 snakes in there with him. He basically riled up the snakes so people could see them attacking his boots. I lost my appetite at this pit...


It was gross. It was overwhelming. The smell of thousands of rattlesnakes is not a pleasant smell.

We had a great time. :)

-Kerry