Our first backpacking trip

We went on our first official backpacking trip with Melina last weekend, to the Salmon River trail near Mt. Hood. It's a beautiful low-elevation old growth forest and a great place to backpack with a kid. The trip started out a bit rough since Melina never napped on the way to the trailhead, and had a very short fuse. She refused to stay in the baby pack (which, since I was carrying all 27 pounds of her plus some gear, was fine with me) but she also refused to hold anyone's hand on the steep parts of the trail. Jeff ended up carrying her a lot of the way. About a mile in (yes, a mile) we found a really nice spot and decided to set up camp. Melina was very excited about sleeping in a tent, and she slept pretty well. Since we don't have a three-person backpacking tent, Jeff slept in his little one-person tent and I slept with Melina in the two-person tent. (When we go for two nights, we'll trade off). Melina went to bed around 8:00 and woke up around 7:40, just like she does at home.

While she was awake, there were lots of things in the forest to entertain her. She enjoyed climbing up on logs and jumping off them, looking for wild strawberries, throwing rocks in the river, staring at bugs, walking across the little stream near our campsite, and running down the forest trails. Jeff also got to take a dip in the ice-cold river, and I spent a nice hour sitting on some exposed tree roots in the river drinking a little airplane-sized Grand Marnier and watching the dusk gather while Jeff put Melina to bed. It's such a beautiful, wild river - obviously there has been a lot of change in the last few decades, with new gravel bars from flooding, new growth, and old stands of white alders looking like Russian birches along the riverbank. I waited for a family of Sasquatches to dart of the undergrowth to slurp water from the river, but they never came. Actually we didn't see much wildlife at all, apart from baby trout, caddis fly larvae in the rivers, crows, and a water ouzel.