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Motoring in from Texas, we crossed into Louisiana just before dusk, across the mighty Sabine River and deep into the seemingly endless pines and flooded fields off I-10 in the heart of Cajun country, Nolan driving with his new Beaumont-bought cowboy hat as Jerry Reed and other old country played and we schemed where to get some authentic Cajun cuisine. Though we contemplated it in Lake Charles, we decided the “Grab n’ Geaux” sounded like it was trying a little too hard. We ended up at Rascal’s Cajun just off I-10 just west of Lafayette (highly recommended: catfish), which we didn’t regret. Nolan insisted on continuing rather than switching off as we made our way all the way to the Florida Panhandle, on the edge of Eglin AFB, passing around the north edge of Pontchartrain and through Mississippi and Alabama’s panhandles on the way, discussing life and politics and brother topics the whole way.
Just past 1am, we landed in Crestview and booked a room at a cheap motel (I think a Days Inn) and crashed, ready for some Florida herping in the morning.
The next day, task #1 was to obtain a fishing license for the traps we planned to set (unsuccessfully, it turns out) for the elusive Reticulated Siren, which required a trip to the local Walmart. Oh boy….I think the type specimen for Florida man, Homo sapiens floridianus, was collected at that Walmart. My brother and I were dressed in herping clothes, and I think we may have been the best-dressed people in the joint at 8:30am. After obtaining our fishing license, we set out for Eglin AFB’s wildlife headquarters, where we obtained a camping/day use permit that would allow us to road cruise and hike certain areas of the reserve, and watched a mandatory video on what to do if we found unexploded ordinance, which was both mildly alarming and highly amusing. A brief late morning cruise through Eglin turned up a species I had seen before, but which was a lifer for Nolan: Gopher Tortoise!!
Gopher Tortoise
With temperatures climbing past 85 and both of us exhausted, we headed back to the motel for some sleep and Nolan’s interview with his possible internship company (which was thrown off due to time zone difference, but which he ended up getting anyway) before heading back out after dinner to cruise again and meet up with an old herping friend of mine from the Sunshine State. Come dinnertime, we headed back out to Eglin, seeing two Javelinas scurry off into the pines along a well-travelled road through the base just before twilight, and spotting a Bronze Frog and a DOR Dusky Pigmy Rattler just after dark.
Bronze Frog
Dusky Pigmy Rattler, DOR
Just after the rattler, my friend from Florida arrived, and we headed to the pond/lake where Reticulated Sirens could supposedly be spotted or trapped among the weedy vegetation, shining for the elusive sirens as we caught up and Nolan acquainted himself. While looking for sirens, we saw a large Pig Frog (several were also calling on the opposite bank), a Central Newt, and a host of cricket frogs, but no siren, so we set traps and moved on.
Pig Frog
Central Newt
After a foggy drive through the pines, we arrived at a top-secret locale that my friend knew of for one of Florida’s most elusive endemic species, and after a long slog through the mud and muck, we cornered our quarry, the Florida Bog Frog!!
Florida Bog Frog
By the time we finished photographing the frog (during which Nolan saw a strange-looking salamander in the sphagnum moss that got away, possibly a Hillis’s Dwarf Salamander), the Pine Barrens Treefrogs in a different section of the wetland had stopped calling for the night, and we dropped my friend off at his campsite and headed back to the motel with one of the South’s rarest frogs in the books.
The next morning started off sunny and mild temperature-wise but humid from the jump. Checking my Reticulated Siren traps at an off-base site first thing in the morning, there was nothing in them, but a burly Florida Cottonmouth slithered into the black waters of the swamp upon hearing me approach and stopped in a decent photographic pose for the long lens on a log about thirty yards from the bank.
Florida Cottonmouth
After this, we met back up with my friend to check the other traps, which hadn’t captured anything, and then headed for Fort Pickens, on the Pensacola Beach peninsula in Escambia County, to both hang out at the beach and take a shot at a few things like Oak Toad, Diamondback, and Mississippi Green Watersnake, the last of which would have been a lifer for my friend. We saw some whiptails in the dunes, but it was too dry to see any Oak Toads, and even under the logs and marsh-side driftwood we found to flip, there were only insects and arachnids, and Nolan and I decided to hit the beach for a spell while my friend continued his hunt for the Mississippi Green. It was a peaceful two hours or so, replete with swimming in the shallows parallel to shore, a pushup contest (which Nolan won), spotting some seabirds like a Pelican, skimmers, terns, and trying to photograph tidal crabs, which darted back into their burrows at the first signs of movement.
Extricating ourselves from the coastal beach towns, we headed inland as the evening descended toward Alabama’s piney hills, stopping for some greasy Burger King, and continuing to a spot along a lush river bottom rumored to have the state-endemic Red Hills Salamander, which utilizes small burrows in the side of clay hills in a few isolated locales dotted in the namesake “Red Hills” of Alabama, a small patch of deciduous ravines in the sea of otherwise flat pineywoods that is Southern Alabama. As soon as we arrived and entered the forest just out of a major river’s floodplain, two things descended on us: darkness and horse flies. On the side of a small clay ravine about six feet deep, I thought I saw a burrow in the hillside, and waited at the entrance for a moment. Salamander!!!!
Within ten minutes of arrival, we had our eyes on one of the region’s rarest amphibians, which was not discovered until 1960, and is the only species in its genus. Nolan, my friend, and I all took turns photographing and videoing the animal when it partially exited its burrow to catch passing insects, and, amazingly, Nolan captured it exiting the burrow to catch a fly on film! Later in the evening, the salamander fully exited the burrow to pursue prey and was found just outside the entrance to its burrow, producing this shot. Unbelievable stuff!!
Red Hills Salamander
The ride back to Florida was sweet indeed!!
The next morning, we retrieved our Reticulated Siren traps, finding nothing in them, and drove east to the Apalachicola National Forest, where we briefly cruised alone and then jointly dip-netted for waterdogs when my friend, on his way back to Gainesville, arrived. The dip-netting was to no avail, although it did produce this handsome juvenile Loggerhead Musk Turtle:
[Loggerhead Musk Turtle]
What a cool way to end our time in the Deep South!
Despite the smattering of solid lifers in the Deep South, both of us were eager to get to Appalachia’s cool, rushing streams, fern-bearing forests, cooler temperatures, memories, and abundant salamanders by the time we left that waterdog spot (the 90 degrees and humidity by 11am certainly increased our pining for Appalachia!). As we rode north, the pine-covered coastal plains of the Florida Panhandle gave way to the cotton fields and intermittent piney hills of Southwest Georgia as we trekked away from the Gulf and into the interior South, and a flight of several pink flamingoes went directly over our car just north of Bainbridge, Georgia, as Nolan did his best Trump impression, but for herping sayings (“It was a beautiful Red Hills Salamander. So beautiful. Some people are saying, the most beautiful they’ve ever seen. No one’s ever seen anything like it.”).
On I-185 between Columbus and Atlanta, we were passed by a biker group based out of Cartersville, GA calling itself the “Zulu Bikers,” which was interesting, and the traffic through metro Atlanta toward our first stream spot on the edge of the Appalachians was much less horrific than I had anticipated. We arrived at our first stream on the edge of the Appalachians just before twilight in the hills of Northeast Georgia, turning up a few Chattooga Dusky Salamanders (one of the new “Ocoee Salamander” subdivisions) and a NE Georgia specialty: the Dwarf Black-Bellied Salamander, as the skies turned to purple then deep blue.
Chattooga Dusky Salamander
Dwarf Black-bellied Salamander
Heading north into North Carolina along familiar highways, we spotted a car with outward-bent wheels, perhaps for racing, and passed the “Big Bear Inn,” just south of the North Carolina state line, which had a cat print as its logo. Paging the marketing director….In pitch darkness, the Cruze dropped into a lower gear as we ascended the mountains north of Clayton and barreled into the Blue Ridge Mountain town of Franklin, NC, where our Airbnb for the next few nights, a camper just outside town, waited. The air was 65 degrees when we stepped out, the smell of rhododendron and mountain laurels and the rushing stream a hundred yards from the campground unmistakable: we were back in the Blue Ridge.
The next morning started with a visit to Highlands Biological Station (due to lack of sensitive species found there, I have little problem getting specific on this one), fifteen miles over the mountains and 2,000 feet higher in elevation than Franklin, but a world apart socially. Whereas Franklin is more typical Appalachia, wealthier folks from South Carolina’s adjacent upcountry cities (Greenville, Spartanburg, Clemson) tend to have vacation homes between Highlands and Hendersonville. The meticulously-groomed and labelled plants and gardens of the station are beautiful, and the trails all marked clearly. Visiting for about an hour, we saw a few Southern Gray-cheeks, an old classic of herping SW NC, and a few of the “Southern” Black-bellied Salamanders (Black-bellies, like Ocoees, have succumbed in the great taxonomic division wars) within and along some small streams running through the preserve.
Southern Black-bellied Salamander
Southern Gray-cheeked Salamander
On our way to a Hellbender spot, Nolan spotted a business calling itself “Upscale Resale,” which invited his chortled retort, “If people have to buy resale, they can’t afford upscale.” True enough, I suppose. After a quick stop at a valley diner (where I was astonished at the number of patrons mid-week in the middle of the day, and how many of them appeared to be 20 and 30-somethings here to hike), we headed to a spot I had hit one time before, a secret, rushing mountain stream tucked deep in Carolina’s Blue Ridge, where the water only runs 1-3 feet deep, but the mighty Eastern Hellbender, the largest of North America’s salamanders, can be seen active in the daylight hours scouring the stream bottom! Sure enough, after walking barely 300 yards of stream, my brother and I saw four of these incredible, ancient beasts (which look even more amazing underwater through a snorkeling mask, a first-time experience for my brother:
Eastern Hellbenders!!
From here, we climbed up onto the Blue Ridge Parkway to take in some vistas, relish the cool higher-elevation air, and hunt for one of the last Desmognathus genus salamanders I had not seen, the newly split “Great Balsam Dusky” salamander, formerly lumped in with the Ocoee. At a small headwater seep along the parkway, we got several, along with some black-bellied salamanders.
Great Balsam Dusky Salamander
On the way back into Franklin, cruising to NPR and good conversation, Nolan briefly filled out a job application for a backup summer plan in case the internship fell through: a security firm. We debated what the best voice and tenor would be for a security outfit’s interview, and settled on an aggressive personality and Heath Ledger’s Batman voice. Best answer to the question “do you work better individually or in a group?” As Batman: “I kill the group.” You’d be hired as a security guard in ten seconds, background-check permitting.
The afternoon lull at the Airbnb included a nap and watching The Waterboy with Nolan, which was a blast, as I had not seen the ridiculous Adam Sandler in probably six or seven years. A nighttime effort to see some North Carolina green salamanders by shining rock faces didn’t turn up any Aneides, perhaps on account of the cool conditions (about 60 after twilight at the high-elevation spots we tried), although we did see a heaping helping of Southern Gray-cheeks like the below. They were so abundant that they were not only on rock faces, but on the trail, perched on rhododendron leaves and branches, and climbing up tree trunks!
Night-shined Southern Gay-cheek
The next day, we did relatively little herp-wise but had a great time, watching some more movies at the Airbnb as a breather (including Mississippi Burning), Nolan taking another summer internship-related call, and then going to a nostalgic campground in the mountains just outside of Franklin to see some old favorites. We got a Red-legged salamander within ten minutes, which I got on video and is on my YT channel, but which we didn’t get a great picture of (and saw several more), but also turned up this curiously high-elevation Southern Redback, which I found interesting in such a lush mountaintop zone:
Southern Redback Salamander
On the way back down to Franklin to go nap a little more (catching a theme to this part of the trip?), we stopped at one of my favorite road-side lookouts on US 64, gazed out over endless lines of blue-green mountains stretching to the eastern horizon, and played/sang a set of bluegrass and older country for the heck of it. An EMS crew from nearby Haywood County insisted that we let them take a picture with us after we said we had been across the country, and only after they left did it occur to us that they thought we were an actual band on tour (we didn’t specify we had been all over the country looking for herps!). Well, if they though we sounded good enough to be a band….we’ll take the compliment in stride. Dinner that night was Cookout, my favorite culinary fixture of the Carolinas and Virginia, which I wish had franchises in Missouri.
That night’s herping was another attempt for both greens and Carolina Springs/Black-chinned Reds on rockfaces (drier areas for the greens, splash zones of a few roadside waterfalls for the gyros and reds), although we only got a gaggle of relatively attractive Seal Salamanders in the splash zone behind Bridal Veil Falls, between Franklin and Highlands. With that neat experience in the books (shining salamanders is cool even if you don’t find your target species), we headed back for some sleep. The hike necessary the next day for Plethodon cheoah meant we needed it.
Seal Salamander
The hike to get a Cheoah Bald Salamander is…..intense. Nolan and I started around 8am to give ourselves plenty of time to get back down in time for dinner in case we had to go all the way to a summit to find them, and even though we ended up finding one about halfway there, it was still a taxing 9 miles where we gained and lost over 500 feet of elevation multiple times, burning countless calories and making our legs sore as can be by the time we returned to the car. But it was worth it, and the views and foliage on the hike were incredible! Took us about 3 hours round-trip to see this guy:
Cheoah Bald Salamander, North Carolina
After a quick lunch at a Wendy’s in Robbinsville where an unusually gregarious employee, John, asked us what we were doing and launched into a story about an Eastern Diamondback in Florida he had once seen that “stretched from the fog line to the center line,” we headed west along the breath-taking Cherohala Skyway toward the Tennessee border, on the hunt for a slimy salamander look-a-like that had eluded me twice at that point. The first trail at which we stopped, just inside Tennessee, saw us roll probably 200 logs and see a handful of duskies, orange-and-black beetles congregating around a muddy spot in the trail, several giant millipedes, and this nice little Seepage Salamander:
Seepage Salamander, Tennessee
Further down the mountain in slightly drier, oak-hickory terrain, it only took about fifteen minutes of flipping to turn up my lifer Tellico Salamander!
Tellico Salamander, Tennessee
Two for two on the day, we took the scenic route back to Franklin, via Wayah Road from Robbinsville, past the signs imploring passers-by to vote for various candidates for “Principal Chief” of the Eastern Band of the Cherokees. For those of you who sometimes herp Southern Appalachia, I highly recommend this road as a short scenic detour—it is much like Little River Road in the Smokies, paralleling a boulder-strewn mountain river, but the pull-offs are much less crowded, and the mountain views are better than at low elevation on the Tennessee side of the Smokies. That evening’s shining attempt toward our Airbnb turned up more Gray-cheeks but little else, and at dinnertime in Highlands, a wonderful bluegrass band played as Nolan and I walked past the “Ugly Dog,” in downtown, with the melody to Allison Krauss’s “Every Time You Say Goodbye” pouring from the lively tavern and into the night.
The last full herping day of the trip, May 25, 2023, was my best day of herping. Ever. End of story. Perhaps I will have a better one someday, but it’s difficult to believe. The last full day of herping on this epic brother road-trip was so ostentatiously awesome it could warrant its own separate post. The day began with checking out of the Franklin, NC camper in the early morning and making the hour-and-a-half drive to the high elevations of the Great Smokies. In the Oconaluftee Valley, just past the painted bear sculptures of Cherokee, there were elk grazing in the early morning summer dew as per usual, with cars piled up on the side of US 441 to get photos of the majestic re-introduced beasts. Just up the road into the park, several wild turkeys crossed US 441 in the fog, and we climbed to a high-elevation spruce-fir forest straddling the Tennessee/North Carolina border, where moss covered the ground like carpet. There were salamanders under nearly every log!! Within an hour, we spotted 24 Cherokee Mountain Duskies (formally Ocoee), 19 of the endemic Red-cheeked Salamanders, several Pygmy Salamanders, Imitators, and Santeetlah Dusky.
Cherokee Dusky Salamander, GSMNP
Red-cheeked Salamander, GSMNP
Pygmy Salamander, with classic "chevron" pattern GSMNP
Imitator Salamander, GSMNP
Santeetlah Dusky Salamander, GSMNP
My favorite thing about this stop, besides the nostalgia value of high-elevation GSMNP herping (my first-ever salamander was July 4, 2009 in Tennessee, and two days later, my first Red-cheeked), was that there were no possible lifers here. There was no pressure, no mission-oriented theme to the stop, just enjoying the salamanders for their own sake and nothing else. With species as beautiful as Red-cheeks and Imitators, that isn’t tough.
The one salamander we had missed in the spruce-fir forest was the one Nolan had most wanted to see, the Blue Ridge Spring. Reds and springs were the one thing missing from this trip so far, salamander-wise, and after hitting a couple high-elevation streams at pull-offs for old times’ sake, we descended into the Tennessee side of the park to hit a spot where I had seen larval Black-chinned Red Salamanders several years prior, toward Cades Cove. Upon arrival, it was about 80 and sunny, much different conditions than an hour prior at over 5,500 feet, and we made the short hike to the muddy seepage quickly, wanting to see a red but also hungry. The second rock had a sub-adult Black-chinned Red!! Not only that, but so did seven other rocks in close proximity just off-trail—never had I observed this density of red salamanders before; we must have caught the seasonality just right.
Black-chinned Red Salamanders galore!
As if that weren’t a good enough send-off from the short Tennessee leg of our trip, on the way back to the trail, I spotted something coiled in front of me on the muddy margin of the seep. No way….Timber Rattler!! This specimen was relatively thin, and slithered into the stinging nettles and underbrush as we approached, but we managed to get some wonderful video and decent photos of him, and show him to a passing-by couple curious about what we were looking at. Unreal luck….
Timber Rattlesnake
After marveling at the insane odds of our Red salamander-Timber Rattler combo on the short walk back to the car, we hit one last stream on the way out of the park to see some Cherokee Black-bellied Salamanders and reminisce over previous visits to this same stream. It did not disappoint in producing our Black-bellieds:
Cherokee Black-bellied Salamander
After lunch at the Little River BBQ joint in Townsend, we started north through Maryville and Knoxville, then out the northern edge of the Tennessee River Valley, toward the Cumberland Gap, and on into the more claustrophobic, closely-pressed hills of Eastern Kentucky’s hill country, where the trip’s herping would conclude with some shale stream salamandering and night-shining for one of America’s most newly-described species with a wonderful researcher and conservationist, Dr. Stephen Richter of Eastern Kentucky University.
What a wonderful evening! Dr. Richter was kind enough to pitch in to my environmental economics video on strip mining, conservation issues around coal-mining, and protection of rock-dwelling salamanders, and to take us around the Lilley Cornett Woods reserve as part of the video. What a knowledgeable and amiable professor Dr. Richter is—he seems to know everyone in herp world, from Dr. Taggart in Kansas (with whom Dr. Richter got his PhD) to some old contacts of mine in the Midwest, and not only that, but knew most of the local foliage, folk history of Eastern Kentucky (including how the owners of the land that became the preserve may have gotten it surreptitiously) and interspecific associations of the shale and cove forests. We did a mix of stream herping and shining rock faces, and found the following stunning haul, including the mother lode, which we were “exceedingly unlikely” to see on account of lack of recent rains: the Yellow-spotted Woodland Salamander, Plethodon pauleyi.
“Appalachian/Northern” Green Salamander, Kentucky
Northern Slimy Salamander
Northern Red Salamander
Southern Two-lined Salamander
Allegheny Mountain Dusky Salamander
Yellow-spotted Woodland Salamanders, Plethodon pauleyi
Bidding Dr. Richter goodbye and picking off some ticks from the night’s several miles of hiking, we headed for Hazard, treated ourselves to a relatively nice hotel, and got a wonderful night’s sleep as the cicadas sang.
The next morning, we awoke in Hazard, loaded up, and made our egress from the hills and hollers of deep Appalachia, briefly stopping in the Red River Gorge for old time’s sake (we had briefly passed through there in 2014 on a family trip, and this is where I saw my first Copperhead) and to film the last few scenes of the environmental economics episode, then emerged from the hills on I-64 into the Kentucky Bluegrass region, with its verdant fields and fertile soils, a world removed from the Appalachians just an hour to its east. The trip concluded by staying with a friend of mine and his wife in Cincinnati, playing disc golf, watching “Escape from Alcatraz,” and just catching up, picking some Marty Robbins and Civil War marching songs on his front porch (we are totally normal…), whereafter my parents drove the four hours from Detroit to pick up Nolan, and we visited over Skyline Chili, a Cincinnati specialty. So ended the trip, as I said a difficult goodbye to Nolan and my parents and made my way back west into the Ozarks with the pinkish purple sunset over Missouri’s dark green hills.
The only thing better than the overwhelming haul of salamanders and other herps we found was the time spent with my brother, an unbroken two weeks after several months apart, exploring new territory and making new memories. Driving home to Southwest Missouri from Cincinnati that day, I wore my cowboy hat and re-listened to all the CDs from the trip, reliving all the moments from Texas’s Hill Country to the sweltering swamps of Florida, the towering mountains of North Carolina, and the hills and hollers of Tennessee and Kentucky as I drove, exuberant about life, exhilarated to get home and get back to my routine and my career, but wistful for the time with my brother that had temporarily ended. I had a feeling that in another car headed north from Cincinnati to Detroit, my brother probably had his cowboy hat on, too.