At a gas station in Death Valley, Ramona asked the attendant – more or less for fun – if he knew where we could film a rattlesnake. With a knowing looking on his face, the man disappeared into a back room only to appear a short while later much to our surprise with a scorpion. He secretively asked us to follow him into a pitch dark storage room. We were slightly nervous at the idea of sharing a very limited space with a poisonous scorpion, not seeing anything and not knowing what was going to happen next. A few seconds later an ultraviolet light went on and we were able to admire the animal in its full glory. But the magician’s show was not over yet. The next thing he did was to fetch a snake from the back room. A non-poisonous specimen, so he claimed – a fact Ramona decided not to doubt after the animal was placed in her hands. The snake immediately took to the camera and was particularly impressed by the fluffy wind protector for the microphone – which it probably thought was a long-haired mouse. The finale of this expedition into the world of reptiles was a tarantula which our host held in the palm of his hand. None of us were to keen to touch this one, though.
In Death Valley we observed one particularly unusual phenomenon: on a dried-up lake, the Racetrack, boulders weighing up to 300 kg move as if propelled by some mysterious force, leaving deep tracks behind them in the surface. They say that this is the work of the Devil himself.

 

Topic: Fire and ice

Topic: Encounters

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