I can relate to Indiana Jones, the swashbuckling Hollywood character played by Harrison Ford who readily retrieves precious artifacts from heavily booby-trapped enclaves in remote places around the globe. He climbs mountains, rafts rivers, races through rainforests, and wriggles through caves, unless there are snakes. Actually, I just do the climbing mountains and avoiding snakes part, which is why the Tongue Mountain Range, a peninsula that juts into Lake George from its western shore, was low on my list of places to hike in the Adirondacks. Tongue Mountain is one of the few places in the Adirondacks where timber rattlesnakes live.
The only poisonous snake in the Adirondacks, the timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus), also called a canebrake rattlesnake or a banded rattlesnake, was the creature on the first flag of…