HikeArizona.COM

Pretty cool forum topic, huh? Well, phobia fans, you're in luck, The Arizona Republic's doing a series of articles this week on all the creatures you love to hate.

Monday--Rattlesnakes
Tuesday--Bees
Wednesday--Scorpions
Thursday-Spiders
Friday-Ants
Saturday--Cockroaches (Well, OK, they don't matter much to hikers.)

Ace Outdoor Writer John Stanley authored Monday's installment on snakes and it's a great piece. Anyone who can't bop down to the corner convenience store to buy the Rep can find it online @ arizonarepublic.com.
Buy it and clip the article or find it on the net and print it out. Put it in a folder with ck1's fine snake article here on HAZ and you have the makings of a GREAT file on snake dangers. We sure hope Stanley writes the articles remaining in the series. He has an ear for great quotes.

Consider these tidbits in today's snake article:

Lots of people use their cell phones to call the snake hotline WHILE they are hiking on Squaw Peak to ask the hotline people to come up and get rid of snakes they encounter up there!

Or how about this tidbit: About 85% of bites come from people trying to make contact with snakes and of that group a large percentage are under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Or one last relevant tidbit: Hikers seem to be the LEAST likely demographic group to get bit. Yea!

J&S in RR

I am an instructional designer by trade - and as a recent project I developed a program to teach children (8 and up) how to recognize common snakes in Arizona. It is still a rough package that still needs some refinement - but if there is interest I would like to post it on this site and have people take a look at it and give me some feedback.

It is a fairly substantial download of around 5 MB for the application.

I have had an interest in reptiles and amphibians since I was a wee lad growing up in the swamplands of Houston TX. I have made them a topic of study for some years. As an instructional designer one of my private goals is to create a program that can be distributed quickly, cheaply and easily to rural areas that can teach children how to identify and treat dangerous snakes.

One thing I have always hated (especially for all the city slickers moving to the rural outskirts to 'get away from the city' - but still remain close enough to have access to a decent mall and a Starbucks) is that uneducated people kill any snake they find - regardless of species. I made it a point as a child in Houston to teach everyone up and down my street the difference between a dangerous and non snake. It got to the point where whenever anyone on my block found a snake they called my house to ask me to come over and help them deal with it. Great fun to be relied on as an expert as a stripling youth.

I hope to have that same sort of impact - but on a much larger scale. Perhaps I am the eternal optimist - but I think that education can make a real difference, and I want to be a catalyst.