What do you call a group of snakes? A sea? A clump? Maybe just a string of profanities?

I guess it depends on who you are, and where you are, but one of the most common terms is a den.

I grew up around garter snakes, but only in the sense that I sometimes would find the skin

they shed or spot the flash of one darting away in the backyard. And this might sound silly,

but I've never actually seen a snake among snakes before. And for a while, I'd imagine them to be

kind of secretive, solitary creatures, slithering solo through most of their lives.

Obviously, I hadn't heard about the dens of narcissists.

I've got pictures of me as a baby being wheeled around in a stroller at this den, and there's

just these spaghetti balls of snakes all over the trail. And as a kid, you just feel like you're in a

wonderland, right? I am Abby Peralt, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's

strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today, more than 70,000 snakes in one place.

Plus, the community that's formed around these slithering dens. After this.

The Red Sided Garter Snake can be found way up north in the interlake region of Manitoba.

This is a cold place to live, especially if you're a cold-blooded reptile.

So these garter snakes have to find warm pockets of their environment to survive.

There are people in the interlake whose basements fill with snakes every spring,

because the foundations around houses allow the animals down into the ground to overwinter.

That's Doug Colgate, a retired wildlife biologist who runs NatureNorth.com, a website about wildlife

in Manitoba. And the reason why these snakes can live there, despite pretty harsh winters,

is because they're all of these natural sinkholes. Not too dissimilar to say an unsuspecting person's

basement that allow these snakes to get beneath the frost line.

The underlying geology is what's called a karst formation limestone that was crushed and broken

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