(InEDC) BY A.J. BAIME, Road & Track Published: 08/15/23 10:48 AM PST
“It felt like I had pricked my finger on a sharp object, like a rose thorn or a needle,” recalls Tony Gallo of El Dorado Hills, California. “Then I looked and saw him, hiding under a rosebush.” It was 10 p.m., and Gallo had been bitten by a rattlesnake in his backyard. He’d heard the rattling and thought it was a busted sprinkler head, so he reached down to fix it. “At a crowded ER,” he recalls, “I was treated like the most important person in the hospital. In seconds I had four people working on me. Heart monitoring equipment. They cut my wedding ring off.” He spent three agonizing days in an ICU. Six years later, he can almost straighten his finger. At least, he admits, he’s not dead.
Nothing can strike fear in the human soul like a rattlesnake encounter. In the wild, only sharks can compare. But sharks don’t show up on your doorstep or even in your home. Just ask R&T’s motorsport editor Fred Smith, who found himself in a standoff with one in his living room, as a kid. He remembers the stress level “like the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
If you encounter one, say, in your garage, who you gonna call? If you live in California, you call Len Ramirez, a legend of the Gold Country who has been rescuing rattlesnakes from people and people from rattlesnakes for 38 years.
You may have seen Ramirez in the National Geographic TV series “The Animal Extractors” or in the 2001 documentary “United Snakes of America.” You may have heard stories of him crawling under the foundation of a rural home at 3 a.m. to catch a serpent, or about the elaborate system of mirrors he uses to peer into holes before he climbs in for the hunt. What you may not have heard is that Ramirez is a first-class gearhead.
From the driver’s seat of his 2006 Dodge Viper SRT/10 Copperhead Edition, Ramirez hammers the accelerator and explains, at high volume over the V-10’s booming exhaust note, why he chose this car as his “play toy.” “I get 15 minutes of fun, that’s all I need,” he says. “I can decompress. Then I can go back to work. This car is how I unwind. I take chances for a living. So this is my release.”
We are cruising in the Sierra foothills on a trove of outstanding backroads north of Auburn, California. This Viper, Ramirez says, is the second that he has owned. The first, a 2000 roadster, burned up in a garage fire at his house. From his cellphone he produces photographs of the wreckage. You can see nothing but a mountain of smoldering ash, and in the middle, a sagging wheel—all that survived. “A tragedy,” he says.
He bought the Copperhead Edition at a Barrett-Jackson auction a couple years ago. It is a rare specimen, one of only 51 Copperheads built in 2006, which was the last year of the third-gen Viper. Copperhead refers only to the paint color and some interior nuance. Otherwise, this Viper is
