It certainly didn't look too hopeful for the prospect of outdoor activities yesterday morning. The pouring rain made certain that the house interior was dark. Unlike when it's sunny and I have to double-check that we haven't left lights on because the rooms at the front of the house are so brilliantly illuminated on a sun-filled morning. Instead, it looked yesterday  as though dusk had long fallen and we hadn't bothered putting on any lights.

Listening to the weather forecast failed to make us any the wiser. The weatherman stated with complete confidence that the rain would be over by noon. The temperature would rise in the afternoon, he informed his listeners, to 21C. Actually it rose no higher than 17C, and then only briefly. When noon arrived the rain kept pounding down. So we hoped that by early afternoon, the rain would stop as predicted. While it failed to completely stop, it was light enough that we gambled the forest canopy should keep us reasonably dry.

Jackie and Jillie were pleased to agree. They knew what they wanted to do, and it wasn't to be agreeable to sitting around waiting any longer. We prepared ourselves with rain jackets, and tucked their little jackets into our pockets in case while we were out in the woods the rain decided to really continue tumbling down on the landscape.

Meanwhile, the intermittent light patter of rain posed no problem for us, and off we set, up the road to access the entrance to the ravine. The landscape shone with that very special sheen reflecting off bright colour, making the various greens we encountered brighter than normal. So different from a dry, bright day, that it's dazzling in the sense that the colour hues are much deeper.

Unsurprisingly, as we forged our way through the trail, light rain continued dripping from the overhanging trees though barely touching us, from time to time a seriously heavier, but short-lived burst fell, on a few occasions, quickly swooped up by the protective trees surrounding us, and only obvious when we briefly stepped out of the shelter of the canopy as happens now and again.

There were still a few, very few, thimbleberries left to be plucked off their sodden perches, and halfway through our hike my husband came across a ripe wild apple at pluck-level, to be shared with Jackie and Jillie. Droplets of light-blinking rain sat on needles and leaves, and despite the dark interior of the forest, light was picked up from some source to be reflected in the prism of the raindrops.

And then all afternoon into the evening hours, more of the sun. Except that at one juncture, even while the rain fell copiously, the sun came out brief, coinciding with the rain. A most peculiar of weather anomalies.