It was surprisingly warm for a June day in Alaska. Blake Stanfield felt the sun on his back as he unpacked supplies on Gates Bar, a gravel spit jutting into the north branch of the Koyukuk River. Hearing the purr of a plane engine, he looked up to see the Helio Courier swooping in to land nearby. His dad was in the passenger seat.
“You can't believe how many bear tracks are out here！” Blake exclaimed as he crunched across the gravel. Caribou and wolf prints also led down to the water.
Neil Stanfield, a real estate consultant in Oklahoma City, began taking his son backpacking in national parks in New Mexico, Texas and Montana when Blake was seven. They both loved the outdoors, but the two of them hadn't been on a trip together for years. So to celebrate his father's 65th birthday, Blake planned an easy six-day expedition on an inflatable pontoon boat called a cataraft. Blake, a family doctor, didn't want this to be a strenuous adventure for Neil, who just two months earlier had had foot surgery. Blake promised his wife, Shelly, seven months pregnant, to take it easy himself. She was worried about going into early labor without her husband by her side.
Spring thaw came late to the region, and the Stanfields would be the first to raft the river this season. They had plenty of provisions, including summer sausage and pilot bread, a hard bread that's a staple in Alaska.
The two men inflated the pontoons and assembled the two-seat aluminum frame of the cataraft. At dinner on the bank, they rehearsed their plan to float 90 miles south, ending at the river town of Bettles, with stops for hiking, eating and relaxing. That night they slept side by side in a single tent.
The next morning was so warm Blake went barefoot and wore only a T-shirt, shorts and a life jacket. Looking forward to fishing, Neil put on long johns, life jacket, waders and boots.
At 1 p.m. they pushed off the bar. The river was running briskly at over 10 m.p.h., so Blake used the oars primarily to steer. Ice, like plated armor, covered the banks. Blocks of it broke off at times, striking the water with a sharp slap.
The Koyukuk kept branching between rocky canyons. To Neil, this isolated wilderness, so different from the plains of Oklahoma, was utterly beautiful. The two men stopped a couple of times to filter water and to hike through spruce and birch woods.
Reaching another junction, they steered left into the main channel. But as they rounded the corner, they saw a wall of ice —— two feet high and a hundred yards wide —— covering the river and its banks. The raft, floating at a 45-degree angle to the current, now veered sideways, parallel to the ice sheet. The right pontoon crashed into the shelf and rocked up the side. The left pontoon sank, shoved down by the current. And then the boat flipped.
Blake and Neil grappled desperately to hold on to the ice ledge, but the river overpowered them. It sucked them under.
Buffeted around, Blake surfaced in a tiny layer of air, about eight inches high, cut beneath the ice by the current. There was barely space to gulp for breath. The water was petrifyingly cold, a degree or two above freezing. In the eerie light filtering through the ice, Blake saw his father behind him thrashing about. “Keep your feet in front of you！” he yelled. That was the position that would provide the most protection if they crashed into rocks.
For 30 yards or more, the two were carried by the current； then they popped up in the open. But ahead lay another ice wall, and again they were swept under. This time with no air pocket below.
I'm going to die, Blake thought. What had he done？ He'd never see Shelly, his son, Heath, or his unborn child. He'd be responsible for his father's death. He ached with remorse.
