Outdoor Life In Utah Can Bite
 A rattlesnake just off Grandeur Peak trail. (Al Hartmann/The Salt Lake Tribune) |
BY SKIP KNOWLES
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
Heather Landsaw spotted a fat rattlesnake sunning in the middle of the dim deer trail as she hiked down from waterfalls on the benches above Centerville.
It was a familiar sight. She and her friend were detouring through the brush when a hot pain shot up her ankle. She glimpsed a small rattlesnake by her foot.
"It felt like the worst hornet sting you can ever imagine," she said. Her ankle throbbed as her companion, luckily a big fellow, carried her the last 100 yards to the car. He recalls her screaming incoherently.
Emergency staff found three bites; she had stepped in a nest of
hatchlings.
"Liquid poured in the wound hurt far worse than the bites. The antivenom made me nauseous, sick to my stomach," Landsaw said.
Nine years later, the Centerville native has covered the scars with a tattoo. But she sees reminders of the incident all the time. Last summer her father killed a big rattlesnake in the yard and shortly after, she killed a scorpion in her bedroom.
"There's all kinds of fun stuff up here," she said. "Rattlesnakes everywhere."
Plenty of bad nature lurks amid Utah's natural splendor. From venomous lizards, rattlesnakes, poisonous spiders, scorpions, biting flies, disease-packing ticks and bees and wasps, there are many nasty ways to wreck a day afield. Poison ivy can cause eyes to swell shut and bee stings can lead to respiratory failure.
Frank Brower of St. George never saw the spider that put him in the hospital. He was folding linen when his hand started to hurt, and by 9:30 he had to go to the Dixie Medical Center. The pain was penetrating, a sharp burning.
"You could see a bite of some sort," he said. "It looked like my hand had been
jammed on a nail."
Brower fell ill and was put on an intravenous antibiotic for 12 hours. It got worse. By the next day, he was taking the antibiotic every eight hours and was also swallowing huge antibiotic pills. By day three, he was worse, but was released.
Redness spread around the wound. For five days Brower was in and out of the hospital. For weeks puss oozed from the open wound, his arm in a sling.
Physicians speculated the spider was a brown recluse that carried a staph infection.
That was two years ago. Ten years prior, his wife Saundra reached behind the stove and a spider bit her ankle. Physicians called it, too, a recluse bite. Soon she couldn't walk. She took Benadryl and was told to stay off her feet for a week. Her shin was swollen and discolored for a year.
Saundra's sister, Marsha Eddy, was bitten in Kanab while pulling her pants on, and her leg swelled badly.
"She got really sick from it. I thought spider bites were not that common," Saundra said. "I've been amazed how common it is."
Physicians at Dixie Medical Center in St. George reported 37 stings and bites last year. The Browers were accustomed to seeing black widows, and sprayed around the house regularly to control them. People constantly report rattlesnakes and scorpions around St. George but mostly outdoors.
Actually, the desert fiddleback brown spider is the likely culprit in the Brower bites. It is a close relative of the recluse. Scientists and arachnid specialists know volumes about spider biology, but are bewildered by its distribution.
They generally agree three seriously poisonous spiders can be found in Utah. The black widow is common, while the brown recluse is rare. The hobo spider,
also known as the "aggressive house spider," is common in northern Utah.
Tarantulas can pack a wallop, but bite few people. And most bites are attributed to mishandling the creatures as pets.
Utah Department of Health epidemiologist Sam Lefevre is a spider whiz and former collector. He once caught a tarantula with a two-inch body and four-inch legs in Hicks Canyon near Tooele and brought it to work.
Most Utah spider bites are attributed to the recluse but are more likely the hobo spider or other species. As its name suggests, the hobo entered the country through Seattle in the 1920s and spread via railway. Black widows can pump victims with a nasty cocktail of hemotoxin, neurotoxin and myotoxin (damaging blood, the nervous system and muscles, respectively). A bite with neurotoxin can be fatal.
Hobo spiders turned up in Utah in 1990 and are most common in Cache and Weber Counties. They bite indoors, while the fiddleback/recluse spiders favor woodpiles and sheds. All spiders pack poison but few have fangs capable
of penetrating skin.
Black widows, bees and rattlesnakes wreck many an outing along the Wasatch Front each year. So, is it safe to toss a sleeping bag out on the desert floor and go to sleep?
Probably safer than the basement. Male hobo spiders creep into houses in the fall. Lousy climbers, they seek dark areas at floor level. And contrary to popular belief, outdoor spiders do not bite sleeping people to suck blood, LeFevre
said. Their fangs only inject venom; they have a mouth to chew and eat. Spiders bite people defensively, though like most mamas, female black widows are plain mean when defending their webs.
Finally, as you begin the annual trek into the great summer outdoors, beware the most revered of all Utah biting creatures.
Rattlesnakes have a much better venom delivery system than any spider and can puncture the legs of passing mountain bikers.
"Mountain bikers are going fast and they don't see the snakes," said
Caryn Summers at the University of Utah Medical Center's trauma center.
"The leg goes down and the snake comes up," she warns.
Rattlers come in five flavors: the speckled rattlesnake, the Mojave rattler, the midget faded rattler, Hopi rattler, (all of these inhabit parts of southern Utah) and the Great Basin rattlesnake -- common along the Wasatch Front.
Snake bite victims at the U. of U. rose to 22 last year from the typical 12 to 15, said Martin Caravati, a physician at the university's Poison Control Center. There have been two cases reported so far this year.
"We think the rise last year was due to the early snow melt, with people and snakes out earlier," he said.
A snake has not killed a person in 50 years in Utah, Caravati said. Serious bee stings are more common, and every fall sees a rash of 20 or so black widow bites at the trauma center. Black widow bites are seldom fatal, but can be a nightmare. The bite appears as a bullseye and is very painful, causing muscle cramps and severe headaches. Scorpions are common in Utah, but stings are rare. The worst Caravati has seen happened when a man opened a package from Central America last year. A six-inch black Guatemalan scorpion stung his hand.
A Utah scorpion zapped a man last year in American Fork. A string from these one- to two-inch amber "bark scorpions" feels like a bad bee sting. One species in Arizona can be lethal, but is probably not found in Utah.
Baby rattlesnakes have concentrated venom and cause a lot of problems when people handle them, said Bruce Mooers, an emergency room physician at LDS Hospital. The hospital sees fewer than 12 snakebites annually, but about 150 spider bites, five of which may be serious.
Southern Utah's big pink-and-black gila monsters pack a venomous wallop, but are slow, ponderous creatures that lack fangs and almost never bite people.
Arguably, the nastiest creatures in Utah are deerflies and horseflies. They are true bloodsuckers, aggressively chasing mountain bikers for hundreds of yards and ripping a chunk of flesh out with every bite.
Short of wearing a Kevlar vest and walking around with a can of Raid, how does one avoid all these nasty creatures?
"Stay in Starbucks," said Mooers. "When you're out there, running around outdoors, you gotta take your lumps. You gotta expect mother nature's gonna bite you. Most of the time we recover."