/hijack on
[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
I can find cites all over the place that claim that the garter snake is native to the south eastern portion of the state. (Or even just the south eastern tip.) But none for a specific sighting.
And I think it’s fair to quote the first cite I listed: “Even though extremely rare to see, the only snake that has been spotted in Alaska is Garter snakes. So, yes…I guess you can say there’s snakes in Alaska, but trying to FIND one up there to prove a point would be very difficult.”
Not quite so common up there.
Still more common than a rubber boa, I hope. 
[/QUOTE]
I believe your cites to be mistaken.
I grew up in the southern end of southeast Alaska (Wrangell Island, if you’re curious), and in fact spent two years working as a wildlife biologist there for the Forest Service in the Tongass (one year of that doing an amphibian survey deliberately looking for rare cold-blooded animals - we were trying to determine whether or not a specific variety of frog was actually an endangered species or not, and since we were being required to do so, it was decided that we might as well conduct a thorough survey of the populations, since it had never been done*) and never saw nor even heard of a snake sighting, nor ran across anything that even hinted at a wild snake population.
When last I checked, snake sightings were reported about twice a year in the Tongass National Forest (which is huge and encompasses most of Southeast Alaska) and substantianted about every third year (on average). To date, every single substantiated sighting was fairly conclusively determined to be an escaped/released pet situation. This has included several garter snakes (although boas are more common). Nobody has ever produced credible evidence of a native population - no eggs, no egg shells, no skeletal remains (including in predatory bird droppings, which are generally a fairly rich source of such evidence - particularly owl pellets), reported sightings do not follow a geographic pattern (randomly scattered, not bunched in one region - if there’s a small population, one would expect to see sightings localized, rather than spread randomly across several islands), etc. I suppose it’s remotely possible that there are some snakes living on the mainland of extreme southeastern Alaska, as that region is essentially entirely uninhabited (the population of the southernmost of SE Alaska basically lives exclusively on a string of islands). If so, they didn’t appear in the wildlife surveys the Forest Service ran in those areas at all. As in, no trace of any snake appeared.
/end hijack
*Fairly large portions of southeastern Alaska are some combination of “nigh-inaccessible” and “really quite difficult to navigate”. This makes doing comprehensive wildlife-population surveys a stone cold bitch. Southeast Alaska is essentially composed of a long string of mostly-uninhabited islands. Not islands with beaches, mind you - islands carved by fairly-recent glacial activity. Those islands are basically trees growing on a thin layer of dirt which covers a big, huge chunk of glacially-carved granite. And it rains 300 days a year, so most of the dips in that granite collect moisture. That moisture generally turns itself into a peat bog. Some of those bogs are upwards of 100 feet deep - and you can get sucked into one just like movie-quicksand. Anything that’s not bog is generally either alpine (some of the tops of those islands are a long ways up) or old-growth temperate rain forest. You need a machete to get through it. Unless you’re on an island, and then you have the fun and romance of a half-overgrown clearcut to deal with. I cannot tell you how much time during that bedamned study I spent standing armpit-deep in a freezing-ass cold swamp or hacking my way through a drippy, cold jungle to find a test site or trap location looking for evidence of wildlife . Wildlife other than the vast hordes of blood-sucking insects vigorously going about their evolutionary imperative on my face and arms, that is.
