After the hike, Rob disappeared on another bird-watching adventure but returned with an excited voice. “I found something you may be interested in, but we have to be quiet and walk softly.” Rob refused to reveal anything further.

We all followed him up the beach and through the brush, Emma hushing Arjun several times when his voice got loud. Then Rob stopped and pointed up at the cliff. One at a time, he let the kids look through his binoculars. Seventy-five feet up, in a cleft in the rock, was a nest. Emma described three grayish-white fledgling birds.

“Peregrines,” Rob said, smiling, “the fastest animals in the world. During its high-speed dive—called a stoop—the peregrine can reach two hundred miles per hour.”

The kids gasped as one of the birds leaped from the nest, flapping its wings awkwardly. The bird plummeted downward, but thirty feet from the ground, it caught a draft of air, leveled off, and then lifted up into the sky.

“He might be flying for the very first time,” Rob whispered with awe in his voice.

That night, we sat around the fire. My dad had brought a book that traced the Green River’s descent from the Wind River Range in Wyoming, south into Utah, then curving over into Colorado. Eventually, it plunged into Canyonlands National Park, then joined the Colorado River, and eventually raced down through the Grand Canyon. He told the kids that in 1869, on this very river, Major John Wesley Powell and his ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on their journey into the unknown. He said we were retracing history.

“That makes us explorers, too,” Arjun said.

As we sat around the fire, I found myself a little sad the trip was ending the next day. It had been such a blast doing a family adventure that everyone could enjoy together and challenge themselves in their own way. The whole family had tried their hands at paddling the inflatable duckies. At sixty-nine years old, my dad had paddled through one of the rapids and gotten sucked against an overhanging wall. He’d ducked in the nick of time, squeaked under the rock lip, and narrowly avoided a nasty swim. Arjun had especially loved riding through the rapids, with Edwin in the middle and Eddi at the helm. A couple of times, the waves had lifted up the front of the ducky, catapulting little Arjun up and over Eddi’s head. In the midst of the rodeo action, Eddi reached out, grabbed him by the PFD, and tossed him back into the boat. While paddling together, both Emma and Ellie had also gone airborne. Emma had swum frantically to the nearest ducky but found herself atop Arjun and Edwin as they dropped and exploded through another series of waves in a tangle of bodies.