"You" and your family are visiting Lonestar National Park. There, you find a souvenir shop where you can buy one of two magical items. Buying the "snake eyes" allows you to transform into different animals, but you have a choice of only two at a time, and you can't always choose when you transform. Buy the map, and it will guide you to treasure in an old gold mine — after a very dangerous journey to get there.
Alone in Snakebite Canyon provides examples of:
- Animorphism: The A-plot is built on this trope. Most of the bad endings involve you being turned into some kind of animal, including a mosquito, a bear, a tarantula, a mouse, a raven, a fish, a snake, and a kangaroo rat. Consequently, you end up on the wrong side of Always a Bigger Fish in nearly all of them.
- Big Brother Bully: Your older brother Pete is constantly picking on you and making trouble for you.
- Bittersweet Ending: Getting turned into a bear. You can't go back to your family, but you enjoy hibernating in winter and are treated well by the scientists studying you.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: In the "map" storyline, you have the choice of following the trail on the map, or a reflection that looks like it could guide you to the treasure. Following the trail gets you to the good ending much faster, whereas the reflection takes you on a longer detour with several possible bad endings, and many more obstacles to face before you can get the good ending. All this could be avoided by simply following the path marked out for you on the map.
- Eye Scream: You transform using magical "snake eyes" - which had to be removed from the snake at some point. In one ending you and Pete both get your eyes ripped out after failing to solve a puzzle.
- Failure Is the Only Option: In the "map" storyline, you need a key to the mine to be able to access the gold safely - otherwise you get eaten by a panther guarding the treasure. You can also access the mine from the "transformation" storyline but, since there's no way to get the key in this storyline, you're doomed to a bad ending.
- Gold Fever: Your goal in one storyline is to claim a vast amount of gold hidden in an old mine.
- Involuntary Shapeshifting: The book is practically based on this trope, with at least one named character ending up stuck in a random animal-form by most endings.
- Jerkass Has a Point: In the "map" storyline, with one notable exception (taking a shortcut in the mine gets you killed), it's usually safer to follow Pete's advice than your own instinct.
- Luck-Based Mission: Some endings are decided by factors outside the reader's control, such as how many letters there are in your name or what time it is.
- Morton's Fork: At one point. the story presents a pair of animal morphs that even the book admits sound less-than-ideal: a slow-as-molasses tarantula morph to cross a busy street, or a mosquito morph through a bat infested cave, right after you ate a mosquito when you were in bat morph minutes earlier. The choices end as well as you expect. The logical third option — i.e., turn into a tarantula and wait in the cave until the snake eyes reset into two other and presumably better animal choices — was completely absent.
- Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: While not indicated to be the case anywhere else in the A-plot, one bad ending has this be the case as you retake human form to freak out a group of tourists, only to find that your clothes have vanished, leaving you naked in front of them.
