Bitten by a Rattlesnake | 1
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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Against the Odds early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. A note to listeners, this episode contains adult language and content. Please be advised. From Wondery, I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this is Against the Odds.

On this show, we talk a lot about risk, big risks, like climbing a 20,000-foot Himalayan peak or exploring a new frontier, and smaller ones, like hiking alone in a national park. But whatever the size of the risk, almost everyone who enjoys getting out in nature has had a moment where they sense danger.

The rustling in the brush, a howl in the distance, intrusive thoughts of bears or snakes or spiders. Most of the time, the threat is just our imagination acting up. But sometimes, what we imagine lurking in the shadows might actually be there, waiting. Usually you wake up and turns out it was just a nightmare. The interesting thing was this time I woke up and the nightmare was real.

That's Outdoor Magazine contributor Kyle Dickman. You might remember his voice from our series on the Granite Mountain Hot Shots, which told the story of 19 wildland firefighters who lost their lives in Arizona in 2013. Kyle had been a hotshot himself and wrote a book about the tragedy. Today, Kyle returns to the show to tell another story, his own.

Not about fighting fires, but instead about what happened when he took his infant son, Bridger, for a hike near Yosemite and almost didn't make it out alive. Here's Kyle reading from his 2018 Outside article about the ordeal. I recall seeing a dust-red coil in new grass, but to me the snake was more of a sensation. A light tap just above the sock on my right ankle. Then I passed out.

I didn't know it then, but in the medical community, the rule about rattlesnake bites is time is tissue. How many minutes or hours elapse before you get the antivenom determines your fate. An afternoon in the ER, amputation, or perhaps, in my case, death on a stone bridge.

On this special episode of Against the Odds, Kyle Dickman is here to tell us the full story and what his brush with death taught him about life, risk, and the meaning of family. My name's Kyle Dickman, and this is what happened after I got bit by a northern Pacific rattlesnake. That's coming up next.

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I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this is Bitten by a Rattlesnake. Long before Kyle Dickman started writing for Outside Magazine, the wilderness was in his blood. So I grew up in the Northwest in Washington State, outside of Seattle, and my parents were just avid outdoors people. They just did it all, and they did it all the time, and my brother was a big fan of

My brother and I were sort of born into a family where the expectation was we would do all of the things that they did. And, you know, lucky for them and lucky for us, we loved it. I can remember going on a backpacking trip in the Washington Cascades as a kid, and there was a big thunderstorm, and we hiked another whatever, 10 miles, and we came across a wildfire. And we hiked into the wildfire, and then we hiked out of the wildfire, and it was just a life of constant outdoor adventure.

Getting out in nature became a refuge for Kyle and a big part of his identity. The outdoors is where I operate best. If I'm ever stressed or, you know, if I'm having a hard time sorting out my thoughts, my solution is to go for a run or to go for a bike ride or to go for a hike. I mean, it's not a coincidence that I ended up working for Outside Magazine. When Kyle married his wife, Turin, in 2010, the adventures continued.

We would go camping and we would do the same stuff I used to do as a kid, but we were like two young professionals who had some disposable income and we disposed of that income by traveling. We would go all over the world. After seven years of marriage, Kyle and Turin were ready to take on a new adventure. We were at a point where we wanted to have kids. We wanted to have a family. I had just finished my first book and so I felt like it was a good opportunity to make a break.

In February of 2017, the couple welcomed a baby boy they named Bridger. I don't think being a parent sunk in soon enough. Within something like two weeks of having Bridger, I was like,

Honey, we should buy a shitty van and take a road trip around the West. It'll be a great experience with our son. And like my wife turns, she's always game. So we bought this 1984 F-350 trans van and it was like this converted RV. It had a bed, a table in the back and these like two big fuzzy velvet, like 1980 style captain chairs in the front. We fell in love with it. And three weeks later we had loaded the family up and we

Started our month-long road trip. Kyle says the decision boiled down to new parents trying to prove something to themselves. I think we wanted to set the tone for parenting. Like, what kind of parents are we going to be? And so our answer to that is we're going to be the type of parents who incorporate our kids into our lifestyle. Anybody who's a parent knows that there is plenty of adventure to be found in having a young child to take care of. Like, period. Period.

But for some reason, we felt the need to complicate it by bumbling across the West. But like that's always been sort of our style, too, right? Like somebody can tell you how something works, but goddamn, I'm going to go learn how to do it the hard way and make all the mistakes and just like dive in head first. And so that's what we did.

So, in early April, Kyle, along with Turin, five-week-old Bridger, and their two dogs, pulled out of their home in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the RV they'd affectionately dubbed Queen. The road trip started with a swing through the Southwest, stopping to meet up with Turin's family near Utah's Canyonlands National Park. Pretty early on, it was clear the trip was going to be tougher than Kyle initially thought.

It was cold and windy and pretty miserable. Then, after a stop in Boise, Idaho, Kyle and his family headed west to Oregon. We went to the coast and we learned about why you should always bring extra sets of clothing on hikes with young children and how there are often nice people who will help you out even when your kid has a blowout. And, you know, it was great. It really was. It was amazing. But it was also extremely hard.

By the time they got to the Redwoods in Northern California, the reality of traveling with a newborn was catching up with them. Bridger was colicky. I can just remember, like, sitting in the van into this gorgeous stand of Redwoods on the Smith River.

Bridger was just losing it, screaming. So I take him out and put him on my chest and do the bouncing thing. And there's nothing that we could do. And those are the moments that you realize that, you know, maybe you're in a little over your head.

The night after we were in the Redwoods, Turner and I had a bit of a come-to-Jesus moment. We're like, this is turning out to be pretty hard. We want some help, or at least we want to be where things are more stable. So that next night, we drove from northwest California all the way to El Portal, which is the gateway to Yosemite National Park. Kyle's brother Garrett and his wife Erin work in Yosemite as biologists. They'd recently bought a place in El Portal that they were fixing up.

Garrett and Aaron hadn't met Bridger yet, so this would be a first. Plus, Kyle's parents were in town. It was basically a family reunion in Yosemite, and Taryn and I were just looking forward to some help with Bridger. We were strung out, you know, we were tired. We weren't sleeping well, and we were sort of looking for a break. It was late April, we pulled into El Portal and let out a big sigh.

El Portal sits on a river in a deep valley and there's these big beautiful oak trees and springtime in Yosemite is awesome because all the snow is melting off of the high country and all the creeks are swollen and full and the creeks were cranking and had these big waterfalls in and we just wanted to get out.

So after spending an evening drinking wine and catching up, the group decided to wake up early, skip the drive into Yosemite Valley, and instead go for a hike right outside of Garrett and Aaron's place. The plan was to follow the trail up the mountainside to an old dirt road called Foresta Road. They figured they'd hike for about four or five miles and take in the scenery. ♪

We were just gonna go hang out in the sun and look at some pretty waterfalls and wildflowers and just have a nice family hike. It was a warm day in April and so I wore shorts and tennis shoes and short little socks and I strapped bridge on my chest. We had one of those awesome baby carriers. A few backpacks full of snacks and water and off we went. Just blasting up toward the hill and it was just a great spring California morning. Just beautiful.

Wildfires had burned through the region a few years earlier, but it was springtime. The landscape was covered in fresh grass, and the wildflowers were in full bloom.

As we hiked along, Garrett and Aaron were just like pulling over, naming all the different species of flowers and plants. And I hadn't seen Garrett for a long time. I was telling him what it was like to be a new dad. And Aaron and Turin were talking about what it was like to be a new mom. After about an hour of steep hiking, the group was ready for a break.

So we'd been hiking for maybe an hour or something. We'd been going up a steep climb, and then we hit the old road and these nice granite rock outcrops. And at some point, we reached a place that you could kind of look down out over the valley, and Bridger chirped his need for milk. He was getting hungry, so we thought, this is great, let's have a little snack. And so we all sort of threw our bags around a group of rocks, and everybody grabbed a spot.

My folks were sitting down with the baby and chatting with Turin and Aaron and Garrett and everybody was just kind of lounging around, just hanging out. I went over to this bridge, this stone bridge that's built across this little creek to go look at the waterfall. So I'd hopped up on the bridge and was like peering down and looking at a series of waterfalls and I was wondering, "Oh, could anybody kayak that? It'd be cool if you could kayak that." And then turned to start walking back and I jumped to a rock that was just off the edge of the bridge

Growing up around this rock was a bunch of tall grass, like knee-high grass. And then I just felt sort of like a stick whapping my shin just above my right ankle. I looked down and I could see the dust-red diamond pattern of a coiled rattlesnake. Once I saw that, I jumped back and I just started screaming, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Kyle didn't hear the snake rattle.

And while he didn't know the exact species of rattlesnake, Kyle knew enough to know he was in big trouble. I just had a sense that this was not good. Things were about to go bad. So eventually I said, I just got bit by a rattlesnake. My parents were like, really? I mean, come on, really? But then they came over and they looked at my shin and you could see two little pinpricks, blood dots on each side of my shin bone, right above my sock line.

Initially, all I felt was adrenaline. I didn't feel the pain. What I felt was something much closer to panic. You've just got a cancer diagnosis or COVID or just took some powerful drug and you don't know what's going to happen or where you're going to go. But you know that wherever you're going is not really a place you want to be. So what I felt was just panic and fear. It wasn't pain that came later.

Kyle's mom had been an ER nurse, and both of his parents had worked in search and rescue for years. They'd never come across a rattlesnake bite, but Kyle's mom wanted to get him off his feet to slow the spread of venom through his system. My mom was basically like, we're going to sit you down. So that's what she did. She sat me down. My dad sat next to me, and I just passed out. It all went black.

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At around noon on April 23rd, 2017, a rattlesnake bit Kyle Dickman while he was hiking with his family just outside Yosemite National Park. After the initial wave of shock, Kyle lost consciousness and things only got worse from there. It's like waking up from a dream where you come to and you grab your partner or your pillow or your bed or something that brings you back to reality. Usually you wake up

Turns out it was just a nightmare. The interesting thing was this time, I woke up and the nightmare was real. When Kyle came to, the nausea hit. Shortly after I woke up, I threw up. And then I just kept throwing up. I can just remember throwing up so violently. At some point, there's just nothing left to throw up, but...

My body clearly didn't like what was in there, clearly didn't like the venom, so I was doing everything it could to get it out. I started with the vomiting and then the diarrhea came. It was just a full purge. What I felt was like I'd been poisoned. In between bouts of vomiting, Kyle's wife Turin tried to console him. But Kyle didn't want her or Bridger to see him in such bad shape.

If I was going to die on some slope in Yosemite, I didn't need to have my wife and six-week-old son watch it. So I asked her to leave and to get Bridge out of there because if things were going to go down the way they were going to go down, then that was not a memory I needed anywhere in his brain.

Kyle's family knew there was only so much they could do for him. He needed medical attention and fast. They were discussing ways to get me out of there, and one option was to hike me out, but pretty quickly it became clear that that just wasn't actually an option. Nobody's going to carry a 155-pound person three and a half miles, and not in the state that I was in. They couldn't drive up there, and so what was left was a helicopter evac.

So while Kyle lay there with his parents by his side, his brother Garrett sprung into action. Garrett ran with a cell phone to this little corner of the ridge. And at that point, he was able to get cell phone service.

Because Garrett was a Yosemite Park employee, he was able to bypass 911 and call the emergency dispatcher directly. She answered and was like, hey, you know, it's Garrett. Oh, hey, Garrett, how you doing? He told her, my brother just got bit by a rattlesnake. And then from that call, a chain of events were started where a helicopter was dispatched.

But on that particular Sunday in April, there were no available rescue helicopters in Yosemite or anywhere else close by. Basically, you start with a small radius circle and start bumping outward and outward and outward until you can find the closest helicopter. Well, it turned out that the closest helicopter was in San Luis Obispo, which is a very long way away.

San Luis Obispo is more than 200 miles southwest of Yosemite, and Kyle's condition was deteriorating. His right leg now throbbed with pain and began to bruise and swell. My mom lifted my leg up to try to drain the swelling. I remember holding my dad's hand, just saying, like, I want to hold your hand, which is crazy, right? Like, you know, I'm 36 years old or something.

When's the last time you held your dad's hand? So clearly, I was very aware that this was not a great place to be in. It was pretty clear that it's going to take a long time to get a helicopter from the central coast of California to Yosemite. So at the same time that the helicopter was dispatched, they also sent...

first responders who were local from Yosemite. At this point, Kyle's brother Garrett decided he might be able to move things along if he hiked to meet the paramedics and help guide them back to Kyle. For me, it was just like, lay there and hold on. And mostly what I felt was the spiral was getting tighter. My awareness was getting looser. So I was just sort of falling into, I was just falling.

I was in shock. I had no fluids on board. I was in a great deal of pain. I can remember thinking that it would sure be nice if the helicopter came. I can remember feeling the urgency of that. Like I didn't have a whole lot of time. Kyle learned later that he'd been bitten by a northern Pacific rattlesnake, a species found throughout the West Coast.

Like most rattlesnakes, its venom is both hemotoxic and neurotoxic, meaning it attacks the body's tissue as it spreads, as well as the nervous system, which can lead to organ failure and a whole host of other problems.

Venom is like totally amazing stuff. I mean, it's this cocktail of all these proteins and enzymes that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be very, very good at killing things. And the venom that I got was rich in a bunch of different things called desinigrins and metalloproteinases. And you can think of them as like being little scissors that blow up cells and results in swelling or bleeding.

On a cellular level, what was happening is that the walls of my blood vessels were thinning. And so I was leaking blood out of my blood vessels into my body. And that was resulting in extreme swelling in my leg. And then I had these massive blisters on them. And there's things in your blood called platelets. So when you cut your finger, a platelet job is sort of rushed to the surface and build scabs to stop the bleeding. In rattlesnakes...

One enzyme in the venom's job is to destroy the platelets, so you can't clot, you can't scab. And so I was bleeding internally. To make matters worse, Kyle was bitten on a vein very close to an artery. And so the venom got pumped all the way through my system. One reason that I was getting so sick and vomiting and had diarrhea was because I was having venom effects everywhere in my body.

We should mention that the old wisdom of sucking snake venom out of a bite is highly inadvisable. And tying off the limb with a tourniquet is also not typically recommended. In most cases, really what you should do is just figure out a way to get out of there as fast as possible. There's like one cure for snake bites, and that's antivenom. With proper medical attention, the majority of rattlesnake bites are not fatal —

But with every minute that went by without antivenom, Heil's prospects worsened. As the venom coursed through his body, the paramedics faced their own ordeal reaching him. Because of the recent wildfires, the roads were in bad shape. They're like driving down this road, and at one point the road's so shitty that they drive off the soft shoulder of the road and the ambulance gets stuck because there's a tree that's blocking it, a fallen tree, because it had just been burned. ♪

So they grab their medical gear and set out on foot. Meanwhile, as Garrett races to meet them, he hits his own obstacle.

He comes across a bridge that has been burned down. This bridge is like 75 feet over this huge waterfall. And there's spray that's spraying all over this bridge and all of the wood that made the top where you would drive a car, walk on, has been burned off. So all that's left is the steel girders that cross this bridge and they're like eight inches wide.

So Garrett drops down and scoots across the steel skeleton of the bridge, over the rapids, to the other side. Up a steep hill, he finds the team of three paramedics. They decide it's too risky to cross back over the burned bridge, so they find another crossing upstream. And then they run down through this field of poison oak and then drop down back to the road that I'm on.

At 1251, roughly an hour after the bite, Garrett and the paramedics finally reach Kyle. And in that hour, by the time they came to me, I was not in a good position.

Like I've never had an IV in my life. I didn't want one. And in that moment, I was like, get it in there, right? Like whatever you're going to do, just give it to me. I don't even care what it is. Like whatever you've got has got to be better than what this is. I also remember them choosing needles and they were like, we'll use the big one. And so they pulled the largest gauge needle. And what that means is that they were trying to get medicine and fluids into me as quickly as possible.

They gave Kyle saline, laced with fentanyl, a painkiller. Shortly after getting some fluids on board, I felt less panic. I was like, okay, this is all going to be okay. We're going to get out of this. It's going to be just fine. And I felt relieved and I felt better. That was the big hurdle, right? I think had Garrett and the paramedics not moved as quickly as they did,

We may not be having this conversation. So I think that initial push is what saved my life. But the paramedics didn't have what Kyle needed most, antivenom. It's really expensive, and it's just not something most paramedics have on hand. After they got the IV and the fentanyl on board, things were good, relatively good for a while. But because the helicopter had to go so far, it took forever for it to get there.

As time passed, the medicine they'd given Kyle to stabilize him was wearing off. It became clear to the paramedics that I was soon to be returning to a critical state. And so I can remember them, like, on the radio calling for more assistance. Like, without the helicopter, can you send up some more people to help out? Maybe we'll consider carrying this guy out of there. So what they did is they, like, rounded up a posse of paramedics

friends of Garrett's from El Portal and they all hiked up to where I was and they loaded me into this little litter carry and I can remember this guy like looking down at me I'm just like staring death at the face and Aaron has put like these aviator sunglasses on my face and I just like white as a sheet and the guy looks down and he's like yeah you're gonna have one hell of a story to write for outside it's just like I was going the wrong direction quickly

Finally, around 4.30 p.m., four and a half hours after the venom entered Kyle's bloodstream, the rescue helicopter arrived. When I heard the thumping of the helicopter's blades, I can just remember feeling so much relief. Like, this is it. You know, it's over. We've made it. Just like hook me up and get me out of here.

The rescue helicopter flew Kyle out of the canyon to a clearing, where they lowered him down and transferred him to a second helicopter. From there, he was flown about 45 minutes to a hospital in Modesto, California, which was the closest hospital with anti-venom. I remember landing on the roof of the hospital. It was just like in the movies.

nurses come swarming out and grab me and shuttle me into the receiving room. And I remember, like, I felt like the ordeal was over. My impression was that, like, I was going to go to the hospital and then they were going to give me a little vial of pills, a little handful of antiviral pills, and they would pat me on the back and say, off you go, young man. Like, then that would be it. But it just, it didn't turn out, it didn't turn out quite that way.

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Head over to Symbiotica.com and use code ODDS for 20% off and free shipping on your subscription order. Five and a half hours after journalist Kyle Dickman was bitten by a rattlesnake near Yosemite National Park, he finally got his first dose of antivenom. There's a saying that time is tissue. So the longer the venom has in your body, the more damage it's going to do. And five and a half hours is a pretty long time.

Over the next three days, Kyle would receive 18 vials of antivenom. But getting some antivenom on board didn't mean Kyle felt better or was in the clear. It's not like you're aware of it. You know, it's doing its thing inside, but my legs still hurt. At this point, the swelling on Kyle's leg had spread all the way up to his thigh.

Kyle was in danger of losing his leg.

The doctors consulted with snakebite experts to determine the best treatment. There's this really perverse procedure called a fasciotomy, and they essentially fillet whatever limb it is down to the bone to release the pressure associated with swelling. So the doctors wanted to cut my leg open to essentially let the fluid out.

While doctors and nurses continued to monitor Kyle's leg, they did their best to keep him comfortable, pumping him with fluids and painkillers and checking his vitals. One of my nurses, this guy named John, he was awesome. He was this old Vietnam vet. He had been bitten by two rattlesnakes. It was just like a real like Western style, like rough around the edges character. You know, what'd you do with them? I ate them, shot them and ate them. It tastes like chicken, you

you know, like that type of guy. But he was like just the nicest guy. John was attending to Kyle when they gave him the final test to determine whether or not to slice open his leg. The test was whether I had feeling in my toes. And John was like tapping my toes and I had sensation. So ultimately they decided they didn't have to do it. Avoiding surgery was a major win for Kyle's recovery. But he was still in a lot of pain.

The first time they asked me to stand up, I was like, okay, great. I know how to do this. And so like I swung my big ass leg off the hospital bed and set it on the ground. And then it was like unbelievably painful. You know, like I think probably my toe touched the ground and then I was like, that's it. Done. No. While Kyle was in the hospital, he heard doctors say it was one of the worst bites they'd seen.

Kyle thinks his rattlesnake bite was particularly bad for a combination of reasons. One is that it was a big snake.

So there's this myth that baby rattlesnakes are worse to get bit by than big rattlesnakes, but that's false. Big snakes have more venom, and more venom is what does the damage. So I was bit by a large rattlesnake, and then I think a lot of it was just time, right? Like five and a half hours is a pretty healthy chunk of time to have a whole bunch of venom sitting in your leg. Also, I think the bite location. The snake essentially hit a vein, so venom was everywhere in my body.

In spite of all that, Kyle was on the road to a full recovery. It helps that his family was there throughout the whole ordeal. Turin and my folks drove Queen, the van, with the dogs and Bridger, and camped out in the hospital parking lot because the hotel right across the street was full. Bridger came in. The nurses let him come in only on the first day. I remember holding him after, and that was good.

Pyle spent a total of eight days in the ICU.

Kyle continued his recovery back home in New Mexico.

And incredibly, three weeks later, he was mountain biking again. I consider myself lucky to have got the opportunity to go stand on the edge of the cliff and look down and be totally fine. But in addition to his physical recovery, Kyle has also had to deal with the emotional trauma of the snakebite.

This stuff was very real. It wasn't trivial. There were long-term effects, and I still deal with it every day. You know, soon after, like, I would wake up in the middle of the night, and I would grab Turin. And I can't remember if she was falling or I was falling, but one of us was falling. And I would just, like, grab her with a start. Not long after his recovery, Kyle started writing an article for Outside magazine about his experience, in part to look for closure for what he'd been through.

I decided that I wanted to go back to the bite site because I wanted to see how I'd react. I was curious to see what it would trigger. So that September, five months after the bite, Kyle, along with his brother Garrett and two herpetologists, or snake experts, made the trek up to a familiar stone bridge. I had some crazy idea that I wanted to go find the snake.

I don't know what I wanted to do with the snake, but I wanted to find him. I think one of the herpetologists was like, if we find him, we can take him. It's okay. I was like dressed up like I was about to defuse a bomb. You know, I had my ankle high fire boots with gaiters and long pants on. And like, I was pretty determined to avoid a repeat of the whole ordeal. Kyle's precautions turned out to be unnecessary. The group didn't find any snakes at all.

The snake experts he was with think maybe Kyle surprised the snake that bit him. Perhaps it had just come out of its den and didn't sense him coming because of the waterfall, which could explain why he didn't hear it rattle. It's hard to know. But experts do know that northern Pacific rattlesnakes are not normally aggressive unless bothered. I think the best thing about going back to it was just coming to terms with the fact that I saw nothing and felt little at all.

You know, it was just a beautiful place where a bad thing happened. It was useful for me because it helped me come to terms with the fact that, like, there's so much in life that we just, we really want to control everything, but we don't get to control as much as we'd like. And that's okay. And just accepting that. That said, he hasn't shaken the experience entirely. I still have a hard time walking in the woods.

After the bite, I really was much more aware of risk and danger and the consequences of what happens when things go wrong. Because for so much of my life, I'd had small things go wrong in risky situations.

But I'd never had a big correction like this. And what was interesting about it was that I was a class five kayaker and I snowboard hard terrain. I mountain bike hard and I do things that people are going to say that is very objectively risky. And the thing that gets me is not the high risk activity. It is the walking in a wildflower meadow with my infant son.

So like, how do you reconcile risk? Like, what do I take out of that? What is my relationship with risk after that? And the takeaway for me was just that like, it just happens. You don't know when it's going to happen, but like,

Something's going to happen. And so every day where a bad thing doesn't happen is a great day. Learn to embrace that. And that sounds very high and mighty. And it's not like I'm actually capable of doing that, but it's something to aspire to. And I think that I see that more clearly now than I did then.

Kyle says nothing could take away his love for the outdoors. It's just who he is. Still, he takes a few more precautions when getting out in rattlesnake country these days. I personally walk much more gingerly in the forest than I used to. I look where I put my feet, for sure.

What I would tell people is that, like, snakes like 75-degree weather. So if it's warmer than 75 degrees, they're in the shade, and if it's cooler, they're in the sun. So look for them there. And jean pants actually do a really phenomenal job at decreasing the amount of venom that is injected into prey or predators. So if you're hiking and you're in snake country, wear pants. It wouldn't be as bad. But also, like, I hike every day or run every day, and this has happened to me one time. Like, it's just a random thing, you know?

You can't mitigate all risk in the world. So you just got to pick the ones that feel most important to you to mitigate and then just keep going on living. And for Kyle, that means on occasion coming face to face with rattlesnakes. The last time I saw a rattlesnake was three months ago and it was just on a run on a trail that I run all the time. And I was running along and there it was on the side of the trail doing its little twitching thing, ch-ch-ch-ch.

And I just did what everybody always does and jumped nine feet directly in the air and then started aggressively skipping down the trail going, oh, just like screaming and skipping for a whole mile. And then this other guy that was across the canyon on another trail started hooting back. So there's like two idiots in the forest hooting back. It was really it was great. It was fun.

Looking back, Kyle holds no animosity towards snakes. He mostly just feels gratitude that he survived. It was my first personal brush with tragedy. Like, I've dealt with a lot of it as a reporter and a writer, but it was the first time that I've ever had to go through the experience myself. So how lucky am I that I got to get this close to death and, like, walk away?

What a life lesson. What an incredible blessing. It was like, I got bit by a rattlesnake. I was in the hospital for eight days.

I got to go home, having felt like I got to reprioritize my life and leave sort of this world where Tern and I were living a wonderful and ultimately very selfish existence into one where it's still a pretty selfish existence, but it's one that's more centered on family. And I think, you know, I just feel very, I feel very lucky. Thanks so much to Kyle Dickman for sharing his story with us.

If you like Against the Odds, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this was Bitten by a Rattlesnake.

To learn more about Kyle Dickman's story, check out his article, A Rattle with Death in Yosemite, from Outside Magazine. This episode was produced and written by Peter Acuni and Polly Stryker. Series produced by Emily Frost. Sound design by Joe Richardson. Managing producer is Matt Gant. Senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr.

Senior producer is Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Stephanie Jens, Marshall Louis, and Erin O'Flaherty for Wondery. Wondery.

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