Salmon-Huckleberry

… is a wilderness area where we went backpacking this past weekend. It’s west of Portland, near Mount Hood. We didn’t see Mount Hood except in the dark while we were driving out to our target base camp, a campground near the Salmon River. We got a late start and when we arrived the road was unexpectedly closed, ahead of the campground, due to a wash-out. So we pitched our tent on the road, just beyond the barrier, and waited to see what the morning light would show.

As it turned out, this road-closure area was a fine place to park our car and our hike was not very much longer than planned. We did have to drive out to get a recreation pass before we started, though.

On that first day it was overcast but not too cold. Much of our trail was along a narrow path on the side of a steep hill. Tall, narrow trees densely covered the slopes and masked most of the scenery except for smaller bushes and trees, and thick underbrush, near the trail. There were lots of interesting sights – moss-covered trees and logs, luminous green maples, various wildflowers, and pink rhododendrons – only a bit more wild-looking than the ones you see in gardens all over Eugene during this time of year. Beautiful.

The first night we camped quite a scramble down from the trail, near a rushing creek. At first it seemed like a good idea to soak my hot, nearly-blistered feet but it was so, so cold that a quick dip was all I could manage without my knees starting to ache! There had been a constant sort of mist for most of the afternoon and evening. It didn’t actually rain much, but there was always moisture floating down from the sky and dripping off of the trees. BN gave it a good long try to build a fire, but it was just too wet. Wet ground, wet wood, wet rocks around the firepit. Oh, well.

Here’s a picture of some trees in our first campsite:

Some parts of Oregon are significantly covered in moss! When you spend time outdoors in places like this Salmon river area, you know why. It’s like a rainforest, there’s always a “rain” falling from the branches.

On our second day we had slightly heavier, more continuous rain. Walking along the narrow trail thickly lined with wet ferns and bushes, one gets pretty soaked from the knees down. And, this trip really brought home the point that it’s really hard, once something gets wet, to dry it out with no sun and no fire. We camped on the edge of a clearing that sloped steeply down to the river, which we could hear but not really see.

BN set up one of our ponchos as a makeshift shelter, and water collected and ran out through the opening where the poncho’s hood was. We collected enough water during the night to fill several Nalgene bottles. Wow!

The area that we were in had several waterfalls along the Salmon river, but we never saw any of them because they were down in steep, inaccessible canyons. We crossed various little tributary creeks on our hikes, and camped and rested at several sizeable creeks. The most visibility that we got of the Salmon river itself was on our hike back out to our car. It was lovely, and made me dream of hot sunny days where some of the spots we saw would have definite swimming-hole potential.

An interesting note about this trip – no mosquitoes. Anywhere to be seen – we didn’t get a single bug bite. Though, after our trip to the Antelope Refuge last June, we had been careful to stock up on bug repellent spray and packed our bug hats. Both items stayed in the packs. Fine with me! Well, we earned a different scout badge this time – the Damp Conditions badge.