I spent the next few years concentrating on family—among other things, Ellie and I had decided we wanted to adopt a child and were doing research in earnest—and cofounding the No Barriers organization, which included annual conferences we called summits. Then one day, out of the blue, I got a call from a guy named Dave Shurna who ran a travel program for teenagers. Teams of kids would spend a school year learning about an area. They’d study the environment, the animals, plants, rocks, and trees. They’d study the history and its people, and then, with all the prep complete, they’d be rewarded by traveling to that place and embarking on a big adventure.

Dave told me about his dream to add a program for blind teens to the roster. The group had a new partnership with the National Park Service and Dave was excited to test out a new location: a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. “We’d just do the first half,” he said, “some of the easier rapids, and then hike out of the canyon after a week.”

He wanted me to help kick-start the blind teen program and first rafting trip. I was a mountain guy and knew absolutely nothing about rivers. They were mysterious to me, yet intriguing. The Grand Canyon, I learned, is known for over 150 named rapids. And while there’s a universal rating system for the difficulty of rapids everywhere else that ranges from Class I to VI, the Grand Canyon rapids have a unique rating scale. Each rapid of the Grand Canyon is rated from 1 to 10, with the 10s being some of the biggest rapids in North America. It was not a typical setting for a blind kids’ field trip.

“Sign me up,” I said.

Over the next six months, we put the word out through rehabilitation centers and organizations like the National Federation of the Blind, and kids from around the country began signing up. We assembled our team of blind as well as sighted teens and met up in Flagstaff, Arizona.

It was an impressive group of recruits. There was a blind girl from Kansas, the valedictorian of her class; a kid who’d gone blind at six years old from ocular cancer yet had wrestled and been elected to the student council; another who was on course to compete in the Paralympics as part of a crew team. On the other side of the spectrum, there were several kids who had hardly been off the pavement, let alone hiking canyons or rafting white water.

The first morning we spent packing the rafts and going over safety training. “These aren’t life vests,” the trip leader, Marieke, stressed, holding up a personal flotation device (PFD). “They won’t save your life. They only help you float. Find the four clips and pull the tabs tight. If you swim, a loose PFD could lift up over your face and actually suffocate you.”