I caught a Great Basin Gopher last week myself (and like you, most of my experiences with them were way back in the last century).

He immediately went into "Rattlesnake Impersonation Mode," and while I was congratulating myself (this was the first place I looked), he acted pretty fearsome. I wish now I'd taken a photo but I elected to bag him while I decided what to do with him (at least my preliminary judgment was it was a male).

I took a walk down the hill looking for others and finally decided the nine snakes (and 18 corn snake eggs) I have right now are adequate, so I returned to the discarded carpet remnant he'd been hiding under and released him.

At this point I decided on a few photos, but it was apparently clear to him by then that I wasn't buying any bluffs, and he was all for getting out of Dodge. I managed a few shots, but nothing as dramatic as I would have been able to get earlier.

Right now I own two gopher snakes, one a W/C adolescent and the other a yearling C/B, as well as a three-year old "Texas Bull." The bull's attitude is clearly the most cantankerous, and she actually nailed me last week (I'd forgotten to wash after feeding some frozen mice to another snake); the two gophers are milquetoasts.

For the most part, what I remember of the gopher snakes from 40 years ago was they all pretty much tamed down easily with one or two exceptions. Of course the other snakes I readily brought home were usually western racers, and these were almost always nippy in comparison.

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