Degrub, I like your play on words--it's quite possible that if one is wrong in this situation, they could turn out to be dead wrong.
However, in this case you are correct. A half hour before encountering this fellow, I had run into a bona fide rattler, of which there are many in this area. Then later, glancing down towards my feet, I spotted a critter with the same pattern coiling up and striking in my direction. I promise you that in this situation, the primitive area of your brain reacts much faster than your analytical process, and the hair on the back of your neck will stand up. After recovering from that shock (the strike was out of range, so no harm done), closer examination led me to conclude that it was not a rattler.
However, this snake, a Great Basin Gopher Snake, may be even more interesting than a rattler. Not only does it mimic the body pattern of the local rattlesnakes, it also flattens its head to resemble the diagnostic triangular shape of the pit vipers. And if you look closely, some scales within the black stripe on each side of its head resemble the vertical-slit pupils and position of a rattlesnake's eyes. Finally, according to my research, it is very common for it to immediately coil up and strike, as it did when I encountered it, to convince you that it really is a bad-ass snake that you should not mess with. And as I can attest, it is pretty convincing.