Why rivers, you might ask? Growing up with young, outdoorsy parents in the 1970s meant shared adventures were a key ritual in our family. Annual hiking, river and road trips not only turned my sister and me into lifelong travelers, they drew us all closer with bonds that only the best family vacations create. Naturally, once my own sons were old enough I hoped they could share some of the same peak experiences.

Rafting the Middle Fork of the Salmon, one of America’s archetypal wilderness rivers, was at the top of my family bucket list. My parents had taken us down the Middle Fork, and the journey, which involves floating through the largest chunk of contiguous wilderness in the Lower 48, still topped my Greatest Hits List of family trips ever. The other? The Grand Canyon. Again, my parents took my sister and me down the Colorado River in the 1970′s, and the experience made such a huge impression, I dreamed of one day bringing my own family. To my mind, saving up for these trips was a financial goal, sort of like saving for college.

The year our boys turned 14 and 16, we signed up for the Middle Fork. As the trip neared, it hit me: why not have the boys’ grandparents come too? It would be 30 years since they’d taken my sister and me down the river, when I was 15. Mom, our family’s original camper had to decline, but my dad, then 69, jumped at the chance and met us in Stanley, Idaho.

There were a few life lessons I suspected my boys might absorb on the river, first was the luxury of simplicity: While most of us had packed a little more than Dad’s carry-on, we didn’t need much. Next was the luxury of isolation: no cell phones, no emails, no texts, no television, no video games, no schedules. In short, bliss!

When we arrived at our first night’s camp Dad rolled out his tarp, anchored the corners with rocks, and casually strolled off to get a beer. “Don’t you think Grandpa Bart looks a little like Clint Eastwood?” my 16-year-old said, setting his tarp the same way. I had to smile. They were already getting the third and most important lesson: how to be cool when everything else is stripped away. Or simply, how to just be.

A good river trip, it turns out, is really more about the people than the rapids. Mark, our head guide, explained our game plan for the week: Wake each day for a leisurely breakfast, pack up and float, stop for a picnic lunch, hit some more rapids, make camp in time to hike and if they were biting, fish. The days eased by as we slipped into river time, the ultimate peace of mind. You know you’ve crossed over when you wake up to the smell of camp coffee and don’t have anywhere else to be but in a raft, heading downstream. It’s delicious.

Now that my boys are young men, I am incredibly grateful we managed to make those trips happen. As in my own family, the shared adventures—even the misadventures—have become the stuff of myth now. They are the stories we tell. The stories other families ask us to tell. Looking back, those are the memories that define those years for my husband and me—the year we did the Middle Fork. The year we did the Grand Canyon. Because they are shared memories, they grow stronger over time.

Here are a few things my boys learned that first week on the river:

• How to tell a story.
• How to play an original song on acoustic guitar for a group.
• How to open a bottle of wine on a tree.
• How to string a fly rod.
• How to paddle a rubber ducky.
• How to flip a rubber ducky.
• How to make bacon for 20 people in a pot (handy trick anywhere).

By day five, drifting through Impassable Canyon, the most dramatic landscape of the week, we were all—ages 14 to 69—changed somehow. I remember it exactly, our three generations floating awestruck between walls of sheer granite and metamorphic rock that rise up thousands of feet, framing the river. Everything was silent except for the rush of the current, the wind in the pines, the occasional call of a canyon wren.

The last day, as we floated toward the take out, we were all a little sad to be leaving.

How to remedy that? “Hey, Dad, how about meeting us to raft the Grand Canyon summer after next?” I suggested.

“You know I’d meet you two and the boys in a heartbeat,” my dad said, grinning.

And because he did, and the Colorado River is longer, we have an even more epic tale. It gets better each time we tell it; but that’s another story.

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Life happens. Families change. And regardless of the circumstances, we continue to do whatever it takes to care for our children in the best way we know how. But it’s rarely smooth sailing. 

When you’re trying to be everything to everybody—mom, dad, breadwinner, domestic goddess—you often have to let some things go. In our family (aside from a clean house), that thing was our yearly camping trip.

Until recently, I can’t say that I regretted it much. Sure, I missed that magical moment when the world seems to stand still in some spectacularly scenic location. But let’s be honest: camping with kids is a lot of work.

It’s hard enough for two parents to manage the weeks of preparation, activity planning, and care and feeding of children who don’t understand why we must brush our teeth at a spigot 100 yards from our tent. It’s impractical—bordering on unbearable—to do all of that solo.

Tent-building alone is solidly a two-person job. And while there are technically other persons in my family—Brontë, 17, and son Colden, 16—I won’t be the first person to admit that teenagers don’t always qualify as particularly helpful.

So when I consider taking a vacation these days, it’s usually a break from the single mom lifestyle that I crave most of all. Give me a day at the spa to unwind. Let me take the kids to the amusement park and we’ll call it a getaway. But camping? No thank you. It no longer seemed to offer the respite I needed.

Still, I knew in my heart that Six Flags didn’t offer the kind of quality time I wanted with my teenagers. I longed for the outdoor, sleep under the stars/reconnect with the kids/“get off the computer and back to basics” wilderness experience we had had every summer before our family of four became a family of three.

Brontë and Colden would be grown and out of the house soon and time for family vacations was beginning to run short.

So I started joking to my friends, “I will pay you to take us camping.” I was actually half-serious, but never had any takers.

Then, last summer, a friend who had just returned from an O.A.R.S. trip suggested that it might be just the thing I was looking for—an outdoor vacation in which all I had to do, essentially, was just show up.

After scrolling through the amazing photos and personal stories on the O.A.R.S. website, I found out that their camping/rafting trips were perfect for partner-less parents. Their professional guides would take care of everything from the tents and sleeping bags to the food and beverages and even games! They even provide a little luxury item called a Paco Pad, which makes sleeping in a tent a more pleasurable experience.

It seemed too good to be true. I booked a trip immediately.

A few months later, I packed up our clothes and toothbrushes and headed to Colorado for a five-day/four-night trip on the incredibly scenic Yampa and Green Rivers.

Pretty soon I found myself in the single parenthood boat again, but this time I had company.

Turns out there were three other single parents on our trip—all with teenagers. The community we created over the course of our trip was almost familial.

On the first night, another single mom offered to help me with the tent. On the second day, a single dad offered to hang out with my kids so I could enjoy a child-free day on the river. By that night, the four of us had started an impromptu single parent support group.

Not only was I well taken care of by the guides and well supported by my fellow travelers, but Brontë and Colden were too. The other teens and the O.A.R.S. guides—who are not only the best river guides around, but also play chef, teacher, Sherpa, housekeeper, activities director and stand-up comedian—provided constant entertainment for my easily bored brood.

On top of it all, I did not cook one meal, start one fire, clean one pan or set one table for five whole days.

Aside from the five minutes it took to put up and take down our family’s tents, all I had to do was be there—to watch my daughter geek out over all the local wildlife on her critter checklist and see how the sunlight looks on my “never comes out of his bedroom” son. Heck, I didn’t even have to paddle the boat if I didn’t feel like it. Most often, I did not.

After years of keeping our family afloat by myself, it was an amazing gift to just sit back and let someone else do the work.

Our O.A.R.S. trip ended up being both the outdoor family experience I had hoped for and it was exactly the respite I needed. Being a single mom is not always easy, but an O.A.R.S. river trip always is.

The post Staying Afloat In Single Parenthood appeared first on River Currents.

This was after a day during which we had leapt from 15-foot-tall cliffs, swam through trains of standing waves, and negotiated scream-inducing rapids mined with boulders, huge suckholes, and raft-swamping ledge drops. The sun had just slipped behind the rim of the gorge and our party of 11 had emptied a gigantic Dutch oven of its chicken-chili-cornbread contents. We’d drawn our camp chairs close as the conversation turned to old college stories and river stories and assorted misadventures endured in the pursuit of adventure.

But Markie wanted to catch a newt.

She’d plucked a reed from the riverbank, bored a hole in a hunk of jicama left over from dinner, and strung the two together in the form of a primordial fishing implement from “Survivor.” Could I help?

The Wild Child

I could not have been more comfortably slumped in a camp chair, or more engaged in the rounds of tall tales. In fact, I could not have been less interested in the remote possibilities afforded of South American legumes, a piece of tall grass, and aquatic vertebrates.

So, of course, I got up from the chair and dangled jicama for newts with my daughter. Within minutes, one of the bug-eyed creatures sidled up to the sodden bait and started nibbling. Markie slowly pulled in the reed, and I scooped the salamander up in my hands.

We have talked about that moment for months. We will talk about it for years. It taught me a lesson in how to turn a guided wilderness trip into one of the greatest gifts you could give your kid. And yourself.

Wilderness trips impose on a relationship a commonality of purpose and direction and even velocity of experience. You slow down to the pace of the paddle, of the trail rising ahead, of the dry fly drifting through the riffle. There is no electronic hypnosis through a flat-panel screen. There are constellations, not pixels. This, in turn, provides fertile ground for the sort of life-lasting connections that become increasingly difficult to foster as a son or daughter soars through the teenaged years.

Our trip to the Rogue had its genesis in Rob Kesselring’s self-published memoir “Daughter Father Canoe: Coming of Age in the Sub-arctic,” the story of Kesselring’s and daughter Lara’s 27-day canoe trip through the Northwest Territories in the summer of Lara’s 14th birthday. I shared the book with Markie, and she immediately insisted on a pact: Let’s do something like that some day.

I’ve paddled remote rivers across Alaska and Canada, but to work up to a multi-week father-daughter trip, I told her, we’d need a guided, multi-day trip as a shake-down cruise, of sorts. Oregon’s Rogue River was a perfect fit.

More Than Adventure

We put in at Oregon’s Galice Resort — 3 oared rafts piled high with tents, personal gear, food, inflatable kayaks, and a group of wide-eyed rafters ranging in age from 10 to nearly 70. For 5 glorious, blue-sky days we floated and swam and paddled our “duckies” through roaring boulder fields and narrow canyons. We caught snakes and day-hiked to ghost ranches and picked blackberries by the bucketful. We watched river otters and launched water fights and lay in our tent with the doors zipped open, wishing for one more falling star.

Before the trip, I could not have imagined the endless and vast and varying types of pure hoot-and-holler fun we packed into 5 too-short days.

But there was more. Over the previous year, Markie had grown up — up and a little bit away — at an astonishing rate. There were fewer requests for bedtime stories. Her door sprouted a sign requesting potential trespassers to please “knock first.” She and I have always been connected at the soul — the wildlife lovers, the contrary spirits, the gregarious loners. It has been said that parenting is largely a process of learning to let go, and letting go was something I’d been doing a lot of where Markie was concerned.

I yearned for a new way to connect, a means to propel us into a new kind of relationship rooted in her emerging self-awareness of who she was apart from mother and father, and where her spirit seemed to be taking her on the untested spectrums of self-reliance, comfort with adventure, and new experience.

When we leapt together off a high cliff and plunged into a bathtub-sized swimming hole of 63-degree water, she emerged from the river with her arms around my neck, screaming her desire to jump again and again and again and again.

I knew then that answers to certain questions of the future were coming to her and I together. And I knew that I would return to that exact spot in exactly 3 years with my 7-year-old son, Jack.

Plan Your Trip

You learn plenty of lessons planning a first-time wilderness trip with your kid. Here are some of the best decisions I made:

Do your homework. There are a few specific questions to ask of an outfitter:

• Are family-oriented departures available? Some outfitters offer itineraries—and hand-pick guides—specifically for trips where there will be kids or youth along. This way you won’t be paired with a honeymooning couple or stuck with a guide who will make that second PBJ only begrudgingly.
• What is the client-to-guide ratio? The number (and character) of the guides on our Rogue River trip was perfect: 3 guides to 11 clients. There are no hard-and-fast rules about this, for different trips require a varying set of helping hands. If the client-to-guide ratio creeps above 6-to-1, however, have a serious conversation with the outfitter about your expectations.
• What is the daily pace of the trip? When I first read that we’d be on the water an average of 6 hours a day, I was a bit concerned. What in the world would we do the rest of the time? The answer: Climb trees, jump off cliffs, skip rocks, explore hidden side canyons. Take a hard look at the itinerary to make sure you’re not being pushed.

Let your child help choose the trip. Maybe you think it would be grand to horsepack for 5 days with your kid. Maybe your kid doesn’t. Maybe you should listen.

My friend Tim Lassiter recently proposed to Austin, his 14-year-old son, a serious backcountry mule deer hunt. “But I could see it in his eyes,” Lassiter reported later. “He didn’t want to disappoint me, but he wasn’t jumping up and down about the idea, either.” Lassiter asked his son for his idea of a dream trip with dad, and then they booked a Costa Rican multisport venture that involved fishing for sailfish, ATVing through the jungle, touring local villages, and hiking through national parks.

“The best thing I ever did,” Lassiter said, “was listen to what Austin wanted.”

Personalize the trip. Commercial wilderness trips have to rely on a certain degree of cookie-cutter logistics. The group sleeps in similar tents, eats the same food, wears the same color life jackets. Do what you can to individualize the experience. Early on, Markie asked if we could take our beloved yellow and purple Marmot tent; she loves waking up to the ethereal yellow glow that suffuses the tent interior when the sun rises. It seemed ridiculous given that O.A.R.S. provided fine tents that didn’t need to be packed, checked on an airline, and fussed over. But we took it. And I’ll baby that yellow tent for as long as I can, knowing that each time we pitch it in the future, we’ll remember our clifftop campsite at Mule Creek Canyon, or the sandy beach along some unnamed riffle where we caught the newts.

Consider taking a friend. I anguished over this. My sole purpose for putting this adventure together was to spend sustained one-on-one time with Markie and allow for serendipitous, meaningful moments of connection to happen of their own accord. I didn’t want to be a chaperone. But I also was aware that the welcome mat between father and child might wear thin during 5 days of togetherness.

In the end, Markie and I had a good chat about what this trip was all about — and we invited George and Katie, another father and daughter, to join us. I knew George would share my desire to center the trip on the bond between father and child, and their presence added immeasurably to our experience.

But I still worked hard to maximize face-time with my daughter. When she wandered off to pick blackberries, I wandered with her. When she turned in at night, I turned in, and our time together in the tent, reading and writing in our journals, led to moments of connection that we’ll talk about for the rest of our lives. It was no easy feat to leave the riverside gathering spot when the story-swapping grew to a fevered pitch. But I’m glad I did.

The Effect It Has On The Kids

“How about this!” Markie grinned one morning, as she scooped up hunks of cantaloupe from the riverside buffet. “Appetizers for breakfast!” For 5 days, our girls never complained, never groused, never pouted. They played cards in the tent, scooped up minnows with the camp colander, scrambled barefoot across miles of lichen-covered boulders, and dutifully marched off to “the Groover” — the designated camp latrine — with a raft paddle in hand with which to mark its occupancy.
They washed their own dishes. They said “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir” and “please” and “thank you” with no prodding. They learned the lesson of getting along with others even when those others were teenaged boys for which (at least for the time being) they can ascribe neither purpose nor function in their universe. Dealing with, and being happy with, the circumstances immediately at hand is an enduring lesson of wilderness travel.

It was as if the woods and the water and the lack of civilization had somehow civilized them — the cotillion of the Rogue.

Even on the river, I wondered how long this would last: How long would we enjoy a kind of cosmic father-daughter afterglow once swim practice and Saxon math homework re-entered our lives? On our second-to-last day in the woods, we were picking blackberries on a periwinkle-cloaked ridge above Mule Creek Canyon. Markie was humming to herself a tune punctuated with grunts of pain from the thorns, and this unselfconscious chorus of content rose above the sibilant sighs of the whitewater 200 feet below, and there were black-tailed deer grazing along a distant gravel bar, heads rising whenever a pot or pan would clank from camp, and Markie said, through cheeks stuffed with berries, “Daddy, I wish we could do this all of our lives.”

And I thought: We will, sweetheart. A week or two at a time.

This essay was originally created for the 2012 O.A.R.S. catalog. For more compelling stories from other renowned writers, request your catalog copy today!

The post How To Plan A Vacation That Reconnects The Family appeared first on River Currents.

Families love O.A.R.S. Lower Klamath River rafting trips. This scenic, forested river trip features beach campsites and rafting and inflatable kayaking in warm gentle water.

Lower Salmon River, ID

Fun, exhilarating rapids, huge sandy beaches through four separate gorges — O.A.R.S. Lower Salmon River rafting trips offer something for everyone.

Rogue River, OR

Raft through forests, meadows and narrow gorges, and enjoy beach campsites and wildlife viewing. The warm water of Oregon’s Rogue River makes it ideal for swimming and inflatable kayaking.

Green River through the Gates of Lodore, CO/UT

Raft through Dinosaur National Monument, hike along rippling creeks to side canyon waterfalls, and look for petroglyphs and fossilized remains of dinosaurs preserved in ancient rock walls along the historic Green River.

Yellowstone & Grand Teton Explorer, WY

Sea kayak, raft and hike the pristine wilds of Wyoming’s Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks on the most comprehensive, all-access multi-sport tour available.

Have you been on an O.A.R.S. vacation with your family? Please share your advice and experiences in the comments below!

The post Top Family Vacation Trips With O.A.R.S. appeared first on River Currents.