The day was sunny and warm. A gentle breeze rippled across the water. We loaded our children, ages 5 and 8, into an inflatable raft and started down Alaska's Big Delta at the confluence of the Tanana and Delta rivers. An easy day trip, we’d been told.

The kids smiled and squealed as we bounced over gentle rapids, moving just fast enough to keep the mosquitoes at bay. After a few hours, we pulled over to devour our picnic lunch of hot dogs and marshmallows. Back on the river, we cruised past other rafters setting up camp and cooking their evening meals. I began to wonder if this really was a day trip after all.

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Hours passed. Our picnic lunch, our only food, became a distant memory. Clouds rolled in; the air turned cool. Fat drops of rain began to fall. Ripples turned to white caps. The river hurled us faster and faster. I hugged my children close and tried to calm their fears, but it wasn’t easy. I was terrified myself. What had we gotten ourselves into?

By midnight we were crashing through Class III and IV rapids, the end of the river nowhere in sight, wind flapping at our flimsy jackets, rain stinging our faces. After several near-misses with boulders and sweepers, we somehow maneuvered to shore and crawled through the window of a vacant cabin, where we huddled under a stranger’s blankets until morning. Our first family rafting trip became our last.

Required Research

As it turned out, the Big Delta was a 29-mile float, a two-day trip at best. Marshmallows and hot dogs were hardly adequate provisions. And the class of rapids was far too challenging for a family with young children, especially at Alaska’s peak run-off in July. We never tried family rafting again, not until the children were grown and they took their own genuine day trip on calmer waters.

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It didn’t have to be that way. Had we planned our trip with professionals that specialize in kid-friendly adventures, we would have learned that nothing beats thrill-filled river rafting for family fun.

"There’s no better place to get your kids away from the distractions of everyday life," says Steve Markle, marketing director of Outdoor Adventure River Specialists (O.A.R.S.), based in Angel's Camp, California. And don’t worry if you've never been rafting before. Markle estimates that 40 percent of O.A.R.S. participants are first-timers, including a number of people who’ve never so much as pitched a tent.

On the river, families bond like nowhere else. "Rafting is the only team-based adventure sport," notes Ken Streater, owner of Destination Wilderness, in Sisters, Ore. "You have fun working together in a paddle raft to overcome challenges. It builds teamwork and camaraderie in a family."