Grit

In order to talk about Great Basin Gopher snakes I have to talk about field herping here in Utah. Most of our interaction with the species has come out in the wild. I can say that I have seen at least 200 of them in the field and that comes from only going out occasionally. We've had nights where we have found as many as 8 different specimens.

2022, Great Basin Gopher snake

Great Basin gophers are fun to find in the wild because they are large (4-5'), they don't move very fast, and they are pretty easy-going when it comes to picking a wild one up. You do have to be very careful that you don't confuse a Great Basin Rattlesnake with a Gopher snake. They look very similar in color and pattern so it's mostly the shape of the body, the shape of the head, and of course seeing a rattle that helps distiguish between the two. And don't count on rattlesnakes rattling when you find them. More often than not the rattlesnakes here don't rattle unless you provoke them.

2010, this is a Great Basin Rattlesnake, not a Gopher snake

2004, a baby Great Basin Gopher snake flattening his head to look like a rattlesnake maybe?

On two occasions we've kept Great Basin Gopher snakes as pets. The first one came in the mid 2010s when a neighbor found a baby in their backyard. They weren't sure how to take care of it and after it bounced around to a few different homes it landed in our home for a couple of years before bouncing again and ending up with a breeder in a town nearby.

2016, finding Grit in the canyon with the family

The second time we kept a Great Basin gopher snake was when we had a family Jeep outing up in the canyon and one of my sons found one. I had been giving reptile presentations to school classes recently and had been wanting to show kids what the local snakes looked like so we kept this one that we found and named him Grit, like sandpaper.

2003, an albino San Diego Gopher snake

There was a time around 2000 when I received a pair of albino San Diego Gopher snakes from a friend of mine. They were babies at the time but I raised them up and bred them.

Over the years the Utah DWR has had different regulations around keeping more than a couple of any native snake species and so over the years I've become cynical enough about our local government and its policies that I now have zero interest in breeding Great Basin Gopher snakes or even keeping other native herps. But there are a few people around who are breeding them so they should be readily available to people in the hobby who want to keep them.