Spider Gap - Buck Creek Pass Loop — Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2020

My husband and I decided to hike the loop in 1 day due to our bad experiences with backpacking and being attacked by mosquitoes. We are trail runners and even though the furthest we’ve gone this year is 20 miles, we were up to the challenge.
We camped at the Phelps Creek campground and began at 4am that morning. It was 3 miles to the Phelps Creek trailhead on the road, all uphill. At about the 9mile mark we entered Spider Meadows.The Trail stays gorgeous from here on out. The climb up to Spider Gap is very steep and very beautiful. I used micro spikes to climb the glacier. The view from the top of Spider Gap is breathtaking. The descent down to Lyman Lakes isn’t too difficult. You can spot a light boot path heading down somewhat steeply. I again used micro spikes for the intermittent snow. There are cairns helping your way to find where the main trail continues. Once past lower Lyman Lake the trail ascends fairly steeply to Cloudy Pass. The views and the wildflowers were mind blowing. We stopped to refill our water and the mosquitoes found us immediately. We put our lightweight rain jackets on with our hoods up and sprayed ourselves down with a deet free bug spray. This method got us comfortable enough so we could relax and take a short break. 
From Cloudy Pass the trail descends . We followed signs to Suiattle Pass. The trail continued to descend. Eventually we came across a sign to Buck Creek Pass and we started ascending. There were numerous downed trees on the trail that were easy to go around. Just when we thought we were almost to Buck Creek Pass the trail started to go down again into the woods. This was a surprise! We didn’t realize how long it would take to get to Buck Creek Pass. We eventually made it there and it is definitely worth the wait and extra effort. Amazing views of Glacier Peak and the surrounding mountains are all gorgeous! The rest of the 11 mile descent back to our camp was  a bit tiring. Our legs were very tired at this point and we did a light shuffle instead of the jogging back that we had planned. We passed a burned out section and went over a broken bridge that is still usable. All in all my GPS said we went 36.71miles and ascended 7,972ft. Our moving time was 11hrs 49min with some light jogging in some sections. This loop is epic!