From Swept Under
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.
The Bears
Neil was terrified. He grabbed his nose, held his breath. The river bounced him against the ceiling, smashing his face and head against the ice. He began to black out.Suddenly they were free. But they'd become separated. Blake surfaced and scrambled toward the bank, searching for his father. Downstream he saw a spot, a flash of yellow being swept away, and he took off running after it -- across the icy banks, darting into the woods and then back onto the ice.
An oar had surfaced in the water near Neil, and he grabbed it. It helped keep him afloat in a low-water spot. His chest heaved as he struggled to breathe. "You've got to swim to me," Blake yelled. He found a dead spruce and held it out to his father. Neil seized the pole, and Blake pulled him in.
Neil was shaking so badly from hypothermia that he seemed to be having a seizure. As a doctor, Blake knew water that cold could kill in minutes. He had to warm his dad up. Checking his pocket, Blake found he still had his water-resistant lighter. Almost all their other supplies -- food, tent, clothing -- were lost. As quickly as he could, he built a fire. Next he constructed a small shelter with spruce branches and a grass floor. Then he stacked rocks for a fire pit. During the night, the men took turns stoking the fire and sleeping in snatches.
Their camp was near a creek so loaded with iron that the ice and rocks were stained orange. Knowing that no one would miss them for a good six days, Blake decided on Saturday morning that he had to go for help while he still had the strength. Father and son divided their meager belongings. Blake kept the lighter, knife, lip balm and map. He took Neil's long underwear and boots. Neil kept a T-shirt, shorts and water-resistant waders. Both wore yellow life jackets for warmth and visibility.
The plan was for Blake to head toward the town of Bettles 65 miles away. But there was a problem -- a thin blue line on the map.
"How will you get around that river?" Neil asked.
"I'll go downstream until I find a way to cross it," Blake said. The Tinayguk looked small on the map.
He set out walking and soon found that hiking over tundra was like stepping on bowling balls. Grass grew in clumps called tussocks. When Blake slipped off, his feet landed in snow melt. To keep bears away, he sang "Happy Birthday" to all his relatives and belted out the nursery songs that he performed for his toddler, Heath. For food, he caught ants and spiders and ate them. The taste was acidic.
By Saturday afternoon, Neil had established a routine: lie in the tiny shelter to prevent sunburn, pick up wood, feed the fire, drink water from the stream, sleep. Do it all over. Once, he slept too long and had to work feverishly to get the blaze going again. He'd need it during the cold night -- and he no longer had the lighter.
To keep bears away, he made noise and yelled out, "I am the king of the valley! If you want to talk to the king, you have to talk to the court jester! That's also me!"
But it was Blake who encountered a bear. Saturday afternoon, he spotted movement -- the biggest black bear he'd ever seen, maybe 500 or 600 pounds, was rummaging for food. Blake crouched down and tried to keep a spruce between himself and the animal. His heart was beating fast as the bear ambled on without noticing him. After that, he sang louder.
"You Look Like Hell"
Late Saturday evening, soaked and tired from swimming across a channel, Blake reached the Tinayguk. The map had deceived him -- it was no thin blue line. It was about as wide as the Koyukuk, too big and cold to swim. And he was too weak. Hypothermia would kill him.Filled with regret for the peril he felt he had put them in, Blake decided to go back to his dad. He was so far from the accident site that no one would look for him here. Wet and miserable, he found a place to build a fire, huddle next to it and sleep.
At noon on Sunday, he finally approached the junction of the Tinayguk and Koyukuk and a wide, open gravel bar. Pilots sometimes flew over this spot. If they did, they might see him.
Blake was freezing. Neil was baking. He curled up under his small shelter to stay out of the sun. But a spark from the fire landed on the roof, and the dry tinder burst into flame. Neil had no way to carry water. Helplessly, he watched his shelter burn to ash. Then, without a knife, his hands chewed up from the ice, he began to build another.
By Monday, the third day without food, both men were growing weaker. Blake was right about the planes -- he'd seen several flying at 10,000 feet, but they couldn't see him. He decided to build a signal fire. The river had washed 30-foot spruce trees into a logjam nearby. Even small ones weighed 100 pounds. Blake struggled to carry them to his fire and quickly became exhausted.
On Tuesday evening, Dirk Nickisch, a pilot out of Coldfoot, Alaska, took several people up on a sightseeing flight. Midway through the tour, he spotted a raft on the river. Flying downstream about five minutes later, he thought he saw something moving on a gravel bar. He flew down for a closer look.
Hearing a plane, Blake bolted upright. He grabbed his life jacket and ran out onto the bar, waving his arms wildly as the plane roared above the treetops and passed over him. Then he dropped to his knees. Please let them see me and know I'm in trouble.
It's a man, Dirk realized. Looks like he's praying. He rocked his wings to acknowledge he'd spotted the guy and flew on, circling back to the raft.
Were other people involved, he wondered? The raft was overturned, but he couldn't see a campsite. There was no room to land, and he was burning fuel, so he had to return to base.
Back at Coldfoot, Dirk's wife called for an army rescue copter while Dirk loaded emergency supplies -- sleeping bags, packaged meals, fruit chews and an aircraft radio wrapped in foam and duct tape to toss down to the man on the gravel bar.
Blake kept scanning the sky. It was two hours since the plane had passed, dipping its wing. Had he dreamed it?
Then it was back. And dropped something. Blake tore into the bundle and found a radio. "I'm okay," he told Dirk, "but my father was with me. Have you seen him?"
Dirk had not. He flew back toward the raft. Twenty minutes later he called, "Can you confirm where your father is? I'm having a hard time finding him."
Blake's heart froze. Had something happened to his dad? He's by a strange orange creek, Blake told the pilot. Dirk made another pass -- two more. Then he spotted something yellow. A life jacket? It wasn't safe for him to land where either Blake or Neil was, but he relayed coordinates to an army rescue team out of Fairbanks.
The chopper picked up Blake first. Seated away from a window, he could see nothing as they neared his father's campsite -- until they landed and his dad climbed through the hatch.
"You look like hell," Blake said, choking back laughter and tears.
"You don't look so hot yourself," Neil told his son.
Their faces were gaunt, their bodies covered with dirt and soot. But both had endured. Neil survived his birthday surprise, and Blake lived to see the birth of his second child, Jes.
The next trip, they promised each other, might involve boating -- but definitely no swimming under ice.