The scariest thing about Rattlesnake Mountain isn’t its thriving population of rattlesnakes. But when you’re hiking away from it in the dead of night and a nearby sagebrush goes all maraca on you, shattering the calm with the thundering announcement of a large-and-pissed-off-sounding poisonous reptile, you will be scared. In all likelihood, you’ll become so scared that you will momentarily forget you’re trespassing on federal land abutting one of the most contaminated places on Earth—a place where under-stimulated security personnel have been waiting their entire careers for the opportunity to chase someone like you down.
It’s said that fear stems from the unknown. What you will know for certain in this moment is that your buddy is behind you whispering some obscenity-laced, too-late warning about snake! and that the tops of the ill-fitting steel-toed boots you’d worn as protection against this very situation don’t feel high enough. What you won’t know in the darkness is the location of the snake. But you will need to get past. In your first summer out of high school, still an inexperienced outdoorsperson, you will have underestimated the hike, causing an unfortunate chain of events: dehydration, the return of your hangover. And you’ll still be several miles away from where the forbidden wilderness area meets the highway, near which you hope your buddy’s truck, hidden just beyond the fence you’d crawled through to get in, has gone unnoticed and not been towed.
You will choose a direction at random—left—and pull off a magnificent, adrenaline-fueled leap. Your friend will backpedal and the two of you will make a crescent-shaped detour around the increasingly loud explosions of rattling. Hearts pumping, you will exchange a glance, your dinner-plate-sized eyes barely visible to each other in the darkness. You had reasoned that it would be nicer to descend from the summit in the cool evening than in the heat of the afternoon sun without considering that legions of spectacular rattlesnakes, monstrous cold-blooded sons of bitches packing venom-filled syringes perfectly evolved for piercing soft ankle flesh in this accidentally protected wilderness area, might have the same idea. There, in the dark, you’ll be faced with another frightening combination of the known and the unknown: somewhere out there, invisible in the sea of cheatgrass that shivers and crashes in the warm breeze, are lots and lots of rattlesnakes. As you hobble away from the mountain, you may ask yourself whether or not this forbidden Shangri-La would have been better left unexplored.
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Hiking aficionados tend to be drawn more to the rainy, forested western side of Washington state than to its barren southern interior and eastern flank. Rattlesnake Mountain alone rules this arid landscape. Standing 3,527 feet, visible for 50 miles in any direction, it lays claim to the titles tallest Washington mountain directly east of the Cascades and tallest treeless mountain in the United States. Its name stems not only from the abundant population of rattlers that call it home but also from its southeast-rolling hills that give the mountain the appearance of being the largest in a chain of snake’s rattles.
Natives in the Mid-Columbia refer to Rattlesnake by the name Lalíik, which translates to “Land Above the Water.” Historians believe the handle harks all the way back to a time of cataclysmic ice-age flash flooding, when the mountain would have been the only solid ground in the region on which ancient people could find refuge from the suddenly 1,200-foot-deep water that engulfed their homes. Rattlesnake is still considered a sacred landform to Mid-Columbia tribes, whose more recent ancestors would climb it to seek visions and who believe their spirits will ascend to the sky from its summit after death. As a young man, the Wanapum prophet Smohalla spent several days fasting and abstaining from water on its summit, where he experienced a vision in which an oriole taught him the songs and rituals that would later become the foundation for his influential religious teachings. The bird also foretold of an apocalyptic day when the surrounding land would churn and swallow the encroaching white people.
As a young man searching for direction, I too was drawn to Rattlesnake. But today only a lucky few have experienced the view Smohalla would have enjoyed from its summit. Rattlesnake has been off limits to the public ever since the federal government absorbed it as part of the security perimeter of the Hanford nuclear reservation in 1943.
