Rain.
The day started well enough: cloudy, but dry. I drove out with Peter (a former 20th Century Fox exec) and Layla (a student from Victoria) to Marymere Falls, just west of Olympic NP. David, our instructor, joked that there was always one person who pounded out to the Falls, photographed, and was back in the parking lot before he had even managed to start up the trail with the final stragglers. This would be me.
The point was not the waterfall, I kept reminding myself. The point was the forest and the moss. Which is good: I’ve got the whole waterfall thing down. Narrow aperture, low ISO, super-slow exposure, and about a half stop up from the automatic meter. The camera always meters against the white of the water, leaving the greens of the moss and blacks of the rocks blacked out. Hmmm. Actually, the meter on my new digital body always tries to take shots as if it were midday, no matter the lighting, necessitating a full stop down instead.
Still, easy. The only challenges with Marymere falls was the huge amount of mist which blurred out half my shots. And the supposedly "washed out" trail right up by the falls. I was the first to ignore the warning signs and walk down the trail.
But the forest. That was hard. And as I started heading back, eyeing the forest, it started to rain. Just a little. Then a little more. Then a lot. Pouring. I don’t know if I even managed anything good. To the right is the best I got. But this is why I’m here.
After lunch, the plan was to head up to Hurricane Ridge. 
Weather was still crap, but there was a slim chance that, if we went high enough, we could get up over the cloud layer. We did get over the cloud layer. The first cloud layer. The second, higher cloud layer wasn’t raining. It was snowing. Big thick flakes, and as we got higher, they began to stick. We turned around. It was a useless trip.
Though we did run into some incredibly tame deer. I must’ve been within ten feet of one buck before I decided I was getting too close. Best shot there: this one of a fawn peeking from outside a shrub.