Wednesday Walk - Snake Road

Welcome to my #WednesdayWalk hosted by @tattoodjay. This week I wanted to share another walk from my recent roadtrip. Everyday of driving, we stopped at a local nature park for a walk. We were near Snake Road and couldn't resist a stop.

Snake Road is famous among the herping community. It is a section of road that is closed twice a year for snake migration. Here's a good article about Snake Road on National Geographic. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/snake-migration
Snake Road is in the extreme southern tip of Illinois about 2 hours south of St. Louis.

Snake Road starts here. The road is a unique habitat.

"Fitting it all Together" sign does a great job explaining what makes Snake Road special. I wonder what was whited out 🤔🤣

Here are the rocky bluffs.

And here is the swamp across the road.

And here is the road between... photobombed by armadillo haha. So now about the armadillos. We were a few weeks early for the snake migration but there were armadillos all over. The most LIVE armadillos I have ever seen in my life. I guess no road traffic is really good for the notoriously road kill prone armadillo 😁

In some places, the swamp goes right up to the base of the bluffs.

This is where we saw the one snake out on Snake Road. I pretty good sized water moccasin.

There were several of these signs along the trail. Not necessary for the water moccasin/cottonmouth we saw 😅 it is one of 3 poisonous snakes that live in the area.

Despite being next to a swamp, the road was well maintained and dry except for one small area with shallow water running over the road.

The closed section of Snake Road is in the Larue Pine Hills Area (sorry for poor photo) We walked from the southern parking area on LaRue Road to the northern parking area on Muddy Levee Road and back. Easy 5 mile walk roundtrip with little if any elevation change.

Snake Road is in the Shawnee National Forest.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/shawnee
The forest is 289,000 acres located between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. There is lots to do if you want to plan a longer visit.

Here's a few good shots of the ever present armadillos.

Despite our best efforts, we couldn't get an armadillo to roll up. They were content to hide or run away. Of course we are maybe too nice to appear to be a serious predator 😊

Thanks for checking out my #WednesdayWalk 🙏 🙂

Here are some bonus pics:

We had a nice sunset to offset the lack of snakes.

It was pretty dark by the time we got back to the car.

Clouds added to the sunset.

The clouds and the water both caught some of the color.