William & Kristina in Spider Meadows. Timed selfie shot from the top of a rock left in the meadows from some long ago avalanche. Sunday 13 August 2006.

Entering the meadows alongside Phelps Creek after backpacking about 5.5 miles from the trailhead. The meadows spill across the valley at around 5100-5400 feet in elevation. Saturday 12 August 2006.

Love these wild meadows sprinkled with Indian paintbrush flowers, also known as prairie fire, wild carrots or Queen Anne’s Lace, false hellebore, avalanche lilies, bear grass lilies, & other wild herbs and wildflowers.

Mountains rise all around us as shadows fall. 

The red paintbrush flowers massed there are from the genus Castilleja. Most of the the common red “Indian” paintbrush flowers found in the alpine meadows of Cascadia are from the Castilleja miniata and Castilleja parviflora species. The common name arises from old Native legends of a prehistoric warrior who became an artist so he could paint magnificent sunrises. His frustration with results led him to request divine intervention. The flowers represent his many paint brushes left dotting the landscapes with nature as his canvas.

Spider Meadow is the proper name, not Spider Meadows, and the Spider Meadows Trail is officially the Phelps Creek Trail. Nomenclature is a messy thang.

Kristina & I push on up the steep trail to Spider Glacier and Spider Gap. We look back across the way we came. Looking down, our campsite is hidden on the right (west) side of the Phelps Creek in the thin finger of forest growing down the slopes to the creek. Altho I’ve been to Spider Meadow several times before with Gwen & Morgan/Dylan & eventually Kate, this was my first time climbing up towards the Ledges and on to Spider Gap. This was Kristina’s first ever visit to Spider Meadow.

It’s a long ways down, out, & back, but first we’re going even higher & further! The Ledges above us are at about 5,300 feet.

Kristina & I were in awe of the majestic beauty around us. The Glacier Peak Wilderness is sublime. Yet there was an ominous uneasiness there, too, an undeniable energy altho perhaps fueled at least in part by our own fertile imaginations, a sweat-soaked sensation of the end of the world as we knew it was closing in on us in some mysterious way as heavy as ice and as quick as fire. We shook it off to return to present moments already passing. After all, isn’t the present moment more real than real? Awareness and self-awareness, be here now, delusions & illusions, we knew such things, knew such things profoundly well, we did. Yet Kristina & I couldn’t fully see these presence moments perceived were but temporary perceptions of a consensual reality made up more from cosmic software codes & holographs & driven by genes & gravity paralleled by consciousness outside of time in ways we still cannot yet measure.

Kristina chugs up the Spider Glacier around the edges of Chiwawa Mountain. The glacier is dying and is little more than a snowfield. The little glacial minivalley makes for a nice oven in the sun, too!

Long haul, aye, but we do it quickly. It’s only a half-a-mile push up this undulating coulour of sorts.

One step at a time. One breath at a time. Plenty of water to go, this Scorpio 

Hunkering down out of the cold wind blasting thru hot, sunny Spider Gap at 7,100 feet. Uh oh, she be lookin at me funny! But she knows I’m just a horny ol’ Taurus bull.

I loved this woman so sprawled out atop the notch of Spider Gap. Passionately. We were an intense couple, too, and lasted as lovers & “life partners” from December 2001 into August of 2012. We were initially part of a blend of a polyamory cluster with intentional community & had privately married ourselves in May of 2005. We married each other again, this time formally, officially, and publicly before our greater community in July of 2009. Our later separation was formalized in September of 2012, and the divorce became final in July of 2013. We remain friends, however, and still consider ourselves the step-parents of each other’s children. Love is easy, but we make it difficult, to paraphrase the actor Liam Neeson. Life is messy. Family dynamics are complex. We currently live thru the century-long breakdown of nuclear families as we build a new culture for humans who choose transformative engagement. Aye, such a primal, futuristic, organic mess!

Kristina Katayama of the World at the top of Spider Gap. Saturday 12 August 2006. Foto by the Author.

Our first time in this high mountain pass. We felt awe at the power of nature as we gazed out across the Glacier Peak Wilderness. The shrinking Lyman Glacier is below us with the Lyman Lakes beyond. The Cascades are a tortured range buckled up from convulsions of volcanism, earthquakes, ice ages, & gigantic floods. Our human-caused global climate disruption was already apparent here in August of 2006.

Looking deeper into the GPW & the North Cascades. The peaks of North Star Mountain rise on the left above Cloudy Peak at 8,096 feet (2,468 meters). Massive Bonanza’s even taller in the center back, tho hard to tell here even as it soars up to 9,511 ft (2,899 m) in height. The sliver of water in the distance is Lower Lyman Lake peeking out to give an impression it’s smaller than it really is. Big ol’ hulking Chiwawa & Dumbbell Mountains hunker down on both sides behind us.

What is this big ol’ black beetle with the giant horns? And, yes, that tent is the same North Face Bullfrog I bought in Lander, Wyoming, back in the Summer of 1986. My tent there has a rich, lusty history, but, gosh, what is this bug? Will it spray blister toxins on my skin? Good Heavens, will it clamp them big ol’ scary mandibles down on my fingers? Will it bite my ass?

Researched this insect afterwards & discovered it’s Monochamus scutellatus, the White-Spotted Sawyer Beetle. It’s among the Long-horned Beetle types, is found all over much of North America wherever evergreen forest grow, & is a wee bit of a tree-boring pest. No, these beetles do not spray blistering agents, and while considered harmless to us social bipedal mammals, some people have reported painful chomp-down nips.

For us this spooky but physically-harmless long-horned critter was like a creature from The Outer Limits.

That’s me, the Author. Timed-selfie shot. Had to crop out a big ol’ boulder in the lower part, ha ha. I’m carrying too much weight and gear long past its prime, but, hey, it all works! Being outside is good medicine for me. Sharing it with an intoxicating lover who also appreciates the Great Outdoors also made this an unforgettable romp in the woods. And mountains! With flowers! And bugs! Those white flowers include a mix of pasque anemone and bear grass but mostly wild carrots. The speck overhead isn’t a helicopter but a buzzing skeeter fly.

William & Kristina. Yup, she carried her big, ol’ gray travel pack everywhere when she lived around the world for nearly a decade. We loved this trip! Too short, tho. One night isn’t long enough.

Saying goodbye but not farewell. We’re near Phelps Creek (just out of sight foto left) & at the beginnings of Spider Meadows, Glacier Peak Wilderness Area. It’s another five miles back to our minivan at the trailhead, and a long drive back to Seattle. This place feels more like our real home, tho. Sunday mid-day on the 13th of August 2006.

One of the oddest and varied-shaped plants of Cascadia. Some call this a tow-headed baby plant. Others label it the Old Man of the Mountains flower. It’s more commonly known as the Western Pasque Flower or the Western Anemone Flower. Short, pretty flowers and a shaggy-haired pom-pom stick makes it unique. Sometimes it’s misidentified from a distance as bear grass. The botanists call it, Anemone occidentalis.

Recovering from mosquitos, black flies, & the itchies!

Mother & Daughter, Phelps Creek, Spider Meadows, August 2007. Foto by DaDa William.

Time for us to say farewell to Spider Meadows. I myself wouldn’t return until the summers of 2015 & 2016.

Farewell to Spider Meadows and the Glacier Peak Wilderness, August 2007.