It’s a blazingly beautiful fall day, the Utah sky a cloudless bowl of cobalt blue arcing above 800-foot sandstone canyon walls on the Green River. If there’s a picture postcard of a desert river, we’re in it—a flotilla of colorful whitewater rafts bobbing along a twisting ribbon of silty water. Just ahead in a bend in the river is a narrow sandbar island, where we’ll camp for the night. We’ve been coming to rivers like the Green since our daughters, now 12 and 14, were babies. In the beginning, we went to the wilderness because my husband and I loved it and selfishly wanted them to love it, too.

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