Boo!

One night when I was looking for something to post on the blog, I started scanning the bark of the redwood trees with my flashlight.  I was a little startled to see a dark face staring out at me from deep within a crevice:

 

Yikes!  No one had told me there were such large spiders living among the redwood bark!  Were there more of them?  Sure enough, I searched more trees, and found several of these beautiful, but slightly scary spiders!

 

I don't know what species of spider this is yet, but I'm hoping to find out some day.  Although these pictures were taken last spring (April 2013), they seemed appropriate for tonight.

Happy Halloween!