Will Steinfeld spends time with Anchorage resident Mike Thompson, uncovering the bizarre story of how he found his father, a former GQ model. Keeping this decades-spanning story pithy, Steinfield manages to reveal Thompson’s staunch character and own impressive achievements while documenting the journey to finding his long-lost dad.
Thompson doesn’t exactly come across as the son of a GQ model. He’s more likely to be outdoors, and dressed for it, biking almost every day out Lutak. His list of former ranger posts is a paragraph long and half a continent across: Girdwood, Yakutat, Sitka, Denali, Ketchikan. Then up to “the big leagues,” as he describes the National Park Service, working posts in Utah, the Cascades, Western Arctic National Park, Kenai Fjords, and Wrangell St. Elias, where he would fly patrols in a single-engine Supercub as one of three rangers responsible for a land area 20 times larger than the state of Rhode Island. Before his career as a park ranger, Thompson spent half a decade as a Federal Air Marshall, and before that was an Air Force aviator.
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