The Dawn Jogger admits to a bit of a snake phobia. She doesn’t much like them, and like other rational people who spend time in the outdoors, she particularly doesn’t like rattlesnakes. In the many years and hundreds of miles the DJs spent hiking on local trials with loyal dog Cassie, they encountered relatively few snakes and only a couple of rattlesnakes. The closest encounter they had was along a trail that paralleled Los Trancos where they had to swing way wide when they came upon a coiled rattler.

She’s never seen a snake on the Stanford campus proper, in other words excluding the Big Dish area where she’s seen a number of gopher or king snakes. But now there appears to be a snake in the grass hovering between the practice and regular Stanford golf course. When she first came upon the warning sign this morning, she thought someone had killed the snake and put it in the shopping bag, but then realized the bag just provided a way to hang the sign. She was really too early for snake time – the sun hadn’t sufficiently warmed the adjoining pathway, which would make a good sunning place for a snake. If the rattler decides to slither a bit west, it will find itself on the third tee…