Hawking Your Where's....

How is everyone this fine cold cold morning...there is a chill factor without there even being a wind...seems the colder it gets...the more I think of warm weather...and that lets me segue into a bubble of remembrance that popped into my pea brain this morning on the way to work...it was spring and for some reason I let my brother talk me into going and photographing a hawks nest with chicks...it was in the High Valley Ranch area north of Selah...as teens we had spent many a summer day up there hunting varmints and drinking beer...the High Valley is high desert steppes...low tuft grasses, bunch grass, sage brush, wild flowers, scrub willows...and an infinite crop of rocks to stumble over that also morph into cliffs and outcroppings...a seemingly constant wind blows across it...we drove as close to the nest as possible and still had a mile to walk to get to it...like I said it was spring...so the wild flowers were in bloom and the steppes were a riot of colors...yellows, purples, blues, gold's, reds...not mixed together but each flower species would be grouped...a patchwork quilt of color...with some intermingling on the edges...the light breeze was cool...we were wearing light jackets over long-sleeved shirts...low topped tennis shoes had me worried about sprains...the ground was littered with rocks and boulders and I have an aversion to sprains...we came to the place where the hawks nest was...we were at the top of a cliff...and after a little searching we found the nest with the chicks...the mother hawk flew off when we were trying to take pictures from above...after that we decided to look at the nest from the bottom of the cliff and started south along the top...the cliff petered out about a hundred yards on...to where we could just step off and reverse our course back to be below the nest...I stepped onto a boulder and then to the ground...at that point the distinctive sound of a rattlers warning could be heard...I do not remember moving...but instantly found myself several feet from where I heard the warning sound...my brother was still atop the boulder...we poked around a bit and found a 6" baby rattler was making the sound...now forewarned we gingerly made our way along the bottom of the cliff...trying to walk on tops of boulders where possible...as we move along the cliff face another warning sounded and we urgently looked around our feet...until I figured out that the rattling was not coming from the ground...it was coming from the cliff face...almost directly in front of me was a two inch wide crack in the cliff...and in that crack were two small rattlers letting me know that I was too close...sometimes nature just is too close for comfort...we did continue on and get a look at the nest from below...but were not happy about the low topped tennies we were wearing...we heard warnings several more times as we retreated...and were very happy to reach the place where we had originally stepped into this snake pit...the whole way back to the rig I was thinking of what could have happened if either one of us had been bitten...I guess it would have just made a story with a different ending...sorry for the detour into the mundane.