The men the river swallowed

It’s the outdoor moment you’re supposed to anticipate but can’t — the one that turns an outing into an adventure or a tragedy. One second Blake Stanfield, 38, and his father, Neil, were basking in the pleasures of wilderness. The next they were in glacier-cold water trying to gulp air as the current sucked them under the slab of ice that covered the Koyukuk River as far downstream as they could see.

The raft trip had been Blake’s idea, a way to celebrate Neil’s 65th birthday in a setting they both relished — a roadless landscape where caribou herds roam and the snowcapped, treeless mountains of the Brooks Range soar in the distance.

The father and son had always been close, and part of that bond had been the outdoors. Wilderness was a familiar place for them. From the time Blake was 7, they had been backpacking partners, and Blake would eventually take up mountaineering and rock climbing.

Blake’s path to Alaska had seemed predestined, though his career did not. While in college, he hopped a ferry and toured the state’s southern reaches. Back in Oklahoma he earned a degree in finance and made a living as an auditor until one day an epiphany identified his true calling. Belatedly, he entered medical school, and in his third year found a residency program in Alaska. He moved to Anchorage, then to the small town of Seward, where he married and started a family. His father, who dabbled in commercial real estate in Oklahoma City, didn’t need much persuading to head north for a river trip.

They had begun their journey on a gravel bar, dropped off by a bush pilot. In no hurry, they decided to spend a night. The first rapids would be four or five days downriver, but safety was still a concern, so Blake used the extra time to rearrange their gear, making such small decisions as slipping his knife and the Windmill lighter he had bought for $45 a few years earlier into his shorts pocket.

They put in the following afternoon. As it happened, they were the first rafters of the season, and the only evidence of other life was the bear, wolf and caribou prints dotting the muddy shore. With Blake at the oars of their cataraft — an aluminum frame strapped to two inflated pontoons — they drifted lazily down the north fork of the Koyukuk in the near-endless summer light. The river was languid and wide — 100 feet or more where they put in.

The main channel cut a winding course that obscured and then revealed the wild beauty that lay around each turn. The two noted sheets of ice clinging to both sides of the river, but paid them no mind because it was June, and because they’d seen nothing alarming when they flew upriver from Bettles, just above the Arctic Circle, a tiny outpost with an airstrip, trading post and ranger station. Nor were they concerned when the river gradually narrowed and the ice began to thicken on both banks. Then they rounded what looked like just another bend and saw the river-wide shelf of ice blocking their path.

The current was too swift to fight back upstream. Neither man said a word as, in a blink, the boat slammed into the ice and flipped.

Suddenly they were under the rock-hard slab, with jagged blocks of frozen river scraping skin from their faces and scalps, with only a thin layer of air offering quick breaths as the current swept them along. Neither knows how long they were under because, as Blake put it, “Time stops when stuff like this happens.”

At one point, they popped into an opening in the river, just long enough for Blake to tell his father he was sorry for getting him into such trouble. Then the river dragged them under another frozen slab, and this time the air pocket had vanished.

Blake’s lungs were bursting. He couldn’t see his father in the dim, green light that seeped through the ice ceiling. He wondered in those last moments how death would overtake him. Would he breathe in water and drown? Or would he black out and be spared those last terrible moments?

And then, in the last seconds of breath, they cleared the ice shelf. Blake gasped for air as he swam for the bank, scrambled ashore and raced barefoot downstream, chasing after his father, whose head bobbed in the distance. Slowly, he gained on Neil, who had inexplicably stopped moving, having latched onto a block of ice that lay just under the surface. Neil could hear Blake yelling frantically, but his son’s words were lost in the roar of the river.

Neil eased off the ice block and tried to scramble up the riverbank but the current dragged him down. As he began swimming in exhaustion for the shore, Blake leaned out, offering a 10-foot spruce branch. Neil grasped it and emerged from the river in the first stages of hypothermia.

“I was shivering uncontrollably,” he recalled.

That was when Blake remembered his lighter. Quickly igniting some tinder, he ordered his father to peel off his clothes.When at last Neil stopped shivering, they started off walking with what they had: the lighter, a knife, two life vests, two whistles, a map, the clothes on their backs and one pair of waders. After a mile or so they found a dry gully with a fallen tree across it. They began piling on branches and dried grass, hoping to insulate themselves from the evening’s chill. Blake climbed a ridge to get his bearings. From there, he could see the raft, three channels away and hopelessly out of reach.

“There was no way in hell I was going to be able to get that raft,” Blake said.

They took stock. In six days, the bush pilot would come looking for them when they didn’t show up in Bettles. In the meantime, Blake worried about growing weak in a spot where it would be difficult for rescuers to see them. He told his father their best chance was for him to go for help.

“I didn’t want him to go,” recalled Neil, who argued that it was too dangerous, with too many fast-running streams to cross. But Blake had made up his mind. He took his father’s wading boots, plus his long johns, and set out at 10:30 in the morning, taking a knife and the lighter. It would be up to his father to keep the campfire going until Blake returned.

Blake climbed a ridge, heading south. Walking on the uneven tundra, he said, was “a lot like walking on bowling balls.” At one point, he spotted a black bear and ducked behind a tree. After a long wait he walked on, only to come upon a sleeping grizzly. Throughout the seemingly endless day, Blake had been singing and blowing his whistle to alert bears, but this dozing grizzly was oblivious.

“How he didn’t hear me, I don’t know,” he said. Blake took a wide berth and, after more than 12 hours of hiking, stopped to build a fire and dry his clothes.

Back at the camp, Neil was having his own problems. Though Blake had gathered a stash of firewood, the fire quickly consumed it. At night, he slept for no more than an hour before rising to gather wood in his stocking feet or fuel the fire. On the second night, he awakened to find his makeshift shelter burning. He jumped through the opening and watched itburn.

Blake, meanwhile, kept walking throughout the next day, until he finally reached a gravel bar where another river flowed into the Koyukuk. What should he do? Return to his father or remain on the gravel bar, where he might be seen by a passing plane? Blake opted to stay, and started gathering wood to make signal fires. He could hear airplanes, but they were flying so high he could barely see them. He pulled out his lighter to ignite the fires anyway, and began worrying about his dad.”Would he fall asleep and let the fire go out?” he wondered “Would it rain? And I worried about bears, both for him and me.”

As the days passed, Neil spent his time gathering wood, blowing on his whistle and collecting more grass for his new shelter. But that one, too, burned when a spark ignited it. His hands were scraped and raw and his face had large scabs from his scrape with the ice shelf.

The days went by, Neil trying to stay awake to keep his fire going, Blake hiking across the wilderness toward Bettles. Both men had gone five days without food. Bush pilot Dirk Nickisch was taking it easy when five construction workers who were building a visitors center in the village of Coldfoot approached him and said they wanted to tour the area before they left. Nickisch stayed low as he followed the path of the Koyukuk River south. At one point, he saw a raft on a bank, but thought it was paddlers who had pulled off the river.

On the ground, the noise of the plane’s motor at first sounded like all the others. But as it grew louder, Blake jumped up and waved his life vest.

“He banked hard toward me, and that’s when I knew he had seen me,” Blake said. “I ended up falling to my knees to let him know I was in dire straits.”

Nickisch radioed his wife to call Bettles and find out who was on the river. By the time he landed in Coldfoot, his wife had notified the National Park Service. She also had some disturbing news: There were supposed to be two men on the river.

With the help of a friend, they took one of the doors off the plane and flew back to Blake, dropping food and a radio. Blake told them about the capsizing and that his father was upstream. They flew quickly upriver and found Neil. The pilots dropped him a tent, a sleeping bag and food. Then Nickisch radioed the rescue coordinates to the park service.

The helicopter arrived four hours later, picking up Blake, who directed the chopper to his father.

Blake, strapped in, looked over as the rangers helped his father in.

“You look like hell,” he said.

“So do you,” Neil said.

“He was black,” Neil said. “He looked like he worked in a coal mine.”

A week later, the sheet of ice was gone. Two months later, Blake became the father of his second son. He and Neil are planning their next trip down the Koyukuk. As Blake says: “We’ve got a lot of friends up there now.”