Identify This Spider

Factual Questions
1

Any guesses? Sorry, I have no idea of scale, other than a description of “fricking huge”. However, your interpretation of “fricking huge” might be different that my sister-in-law’s, so YMMV.

Thanks!

2

An Orb spider of some sort: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://geoinfo.nmt.edu/staff/wilks/spiders/images/Orb-Spider.jpg&imgrefurl=http://geoinfo.nmt.edu/staff/wilks/spiders/pages/Orb-Spider.html&h=300&w=400&sz=15&hl=en&start=20&um=1&tbnid=dFidtQf2R2SqfM:&tbnh=93&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dorb%2Bspider%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26sa%3DN

3

Bingo…thanks!

4

For future reference, the left column of bugguide.net has a clickable guide to our creepy-crawly friends: “We collect photographs of bugs from the United States and Canada for identification and research.”

5

It should be noted that “orb spider” is a very broad category. Any spider which weaves a web in that familiar concentric-polygons-with-spokes pattern is an orb spider.