Get Into Your Kayaks!

Before we had kids, we did our share of river-rafting. And like most people, we began to crave bigger thrills each time we went out. Class III rapids were exciting at first, but soon started to become routine. Class IV became our new "fix" - with huge waves that threatened to swamp our boat, before we (or more correctly, our guide) steered through all that crazy foam and brought us to safety.

Who knows what we would have craved next. But then kids showed up. Rafting dropped out of the mix for a few years. When our boys finally were big enough to get into a raft, the only outfitters that would take our family -- understandably -- didn't want to do anything riskier than a lot of Class IIs with an occasional mild Class III thrown in. It was fun to hear our boys shriek as the boat got splashed a bit. For the grownups, though, gliding through thigh-high rapids was pretty anticlimactic stuff.

Give all the credit to Pete Wallstrom, who runs Momentum River Expeditions out of Ashland OR. He took us out on the Klamath River a couple years ago with the kids on the big raft, and the grownups in inflatable canoes. Suddenly Class III wasn't boring anymore. In fact, if we got sloppy, the Klamath's Class III rapids weren't even navigable. Each of the adults got thrown out of his or her canoe at least once, leaving us to swim through the rest of the rapid, chasing our paddle, our canoe and our pride.

It brought all the thrills back, without involving our kids in anything reckless. Our oldest boy tried kayaking the rapids a couple times and did passably well. (Riding higher on the water helped a lot.) Our youngest opted for the safety of the raft all the way through.

We haven't yet figured out a way to turning long-distance hiking, bicycling or other adventures into two-track activities where the kids are secure and the parents are testing new frontiers. But with careful selection, I'm hoping that's possible, too.