It's always nice to get away for a day or even a moment with someone who had a hand in raising you.

Buy them lunch to repay one of those bags of food that prepared you before school when you were a kid.

Sit down and listen. Something a child or teenager takes for granted

that someone will always be there to listen, at least for the lucky ones. So how unlucky to take

your dad for a trip as a way of thanking him for a healthy exposure to the wild and put him in danger

of exposure in the wild. Welcome to marooned, harrowing tales of the catastrophically lost.

I'm Jack Luna. This is Aaron Abel. Neil Stanfield and his son Blake always felt a calling to be

outdoors. Spending summers hiking and backpacking together since Blake was a young boy, this was their father-son time,

time to get away from everyone and everything and just be alone together. Naturally, as the years

passed, and Blake grew up, the trips became more rare, and when life guided Blake into the medical

field and then onto a residency in Seward, Alaska, 4,000 miles away from his home in Oklahoma

City, that father-son time became all the more precious. So in October of 2002, when Blake

Stanfield, now a 38-year-old doctor, husband, and father of one, soon to be two, sent his own

father a travel guidebook for the gates of the Arctic National Park and proposed

a father-son rafting trip. Neil needed no persuading. Blake wanted to do something special for his father's

upcoming 65th birthday, and the two began to plan the father-son adventure of a lifetime.

Blake was a well-seasoned outdoorsman by this point, and had grown

into an avid mountaineer, rock climber, and competitive runner. They were very much looking forward to the

opportunity to spend time together father and son were exploring such a remote and scenic destination.

The gates to the Arctic marks a place in the Brooks Mountain Range in northern Alaska where the North Forkoyokuk River passes between two mountains,

frigid crags and Boreal Mountain, carving a passageway into the far north Arctic.

This national park and preserve covers over 20,000 square miles of untouched wilderness.

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