Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

alanro and Jeanne (WINOLJ) visited us over the weekend. We played a lot of Scrabble—four-player games feel rather different from two-player—and yesterday drove east to Olallie State Park and walked/hiked in the woods. (The path was bumpy with tree roots and had few flat places, but not much slope either.)

That bit of the Cascade foothills includes a narrow band of rainforest. I don't know whether we were technically in the rainforest, but it looked and felt a lot like the Hoh rainforest we visited in June, on the Olympic Peninsula, with the bonus of actually being damp. (It hadn't rained in a week or two before our June trip.) There were muddy spots on the path, and a light rain fell for part of the time we were there. I was impressed by the numbers and sizes of the ferns, and took a few photos of ferns growing out of the sides of tree trunks.

They left this morning, and this afternoon I did some of my weight-lifting and resistance exercises; the walk yesterday was good, and worked my quads quite a bit (1.5 miles, but keeping my balance on variously tilted surfaces is more work than a paved/smooth path, even a somewhat steep one).