A fun trip, Tim. It was good seeing you again. That ribbon snake is a beaut.

I saw more cottonmouths on my two day visit than i'd seen in 40 years of snake hunting, hiking and canoeing in Florida. (though i never sought them out, so that can account for that odd statistic; still, i saw hundreds of non-venomous watersnakes during that time.) I was struck by the absence of any big cottonmouths on snake road: as you pointed out, the westerns are apparently smaller than the florida and eastern varieties.

Here are a couple pix of the larger of the ratsnakes. Looks like these were taken before it drew blood!