LOS ANGELES - American wilderness explorer Roman Dial has crossed some of the wildest mountain ranges in Alaska on foot and is known for his mountaineering, rafting and survival skills.
And he raised his son, Cody Roman, to be just as capable an outdoorsman from a young age.
So when the 27-year-old vanished during a solo hike through a Costa Rican national park in 2014, Dial was mystified.
He embarked on a two-year search that ended when the young man's body was found. The cause of death: a tree falling on his camp in 2014.
Yet the 59-year-old - whose best-selling book about the search, The Adventurer's Son: A Memoir, was published to stellar reviews earlier this year - has no regrets about raising him to be a self-sufficient adventurer.
Still, his death has changed the way Dial now views the risks he takes on his own outdoor adventures, he tells The Straits Times in a call from his home in Anchorage, Alaska, where he is a professor of biology and mathematics.
Some of Dial's two-year ordeal is documented in the series Disappeared: The Search For Cody Dial, which debuts in Singapore at 10.30pm on Monday (June 22) on Fox Crime (Singtel Channel 313, StarHub Channel 503 and Fox+).
But Dial is not exactly thrilled about how his son and the search were depicted on the show, which was first broadcast under a different title in 2016 and does not reflect what really happened to the young man, whose body was found several months after it aired.
It sees investigators following various leads and even wondering if there might have been foul play involving a drug dealer they thought he had met.
They were so keen on this criminal angle, however, that they dismissed whatever Dial had to say about the character of his son and how well he knew him.
"I'd done a wilderness adventure trip with him every year since he was six and had been in touch with him during his travels," Dial says. So the show's theories about his son having hired a guide or spent time with a drug dealer before his disappearance "just didn't fit".
Dial's memoir was a way to set the record straight, therefore, and point out that his son was an experienced and capable traveller and an expert outdoorsman.
"The first part of my book is devoted to how I raised him. When he was six, he and I hiked alone across 60 miles (97km) on an empty Aleutian island.
"And in his teenage years, he spent two months with me at a research station in Sabah."
Dial also wrote the memoir because he "just wanted to process what had happened for myself, and tell the story for family and friends".
In addition, the book is a celebration of his son's life and the fact that Dial had raised him and his younger sister Jazz, now 31, to be self-sufficient.
"But they were still close to us and that's the wish of every parent - to have independent kids who still love and connect with their family."
The tragic search for his son did, however, change Dial's calculus when it comes to the risks involved on such adventures.
"I've been sort of a selfish adventurer for 40 years," he admits. "I quit climbing big mountains about 30 years ago because I realised how dangerous it was and that's when I decided to get married and have kids.
"But I continued to do things like ski across glaciers, climb tall tropical trees and go whitewater rafting, and I'm embarrassed to say I did not realise, till my mid-50s, that if we die (on these trips), the people who love us are the ones who hurt the most.
"When my son disappeared, I felt so much pain and grief that it made me rethink what I was doing and be more careful."
Some of the readers of Dial's popular memoir have come to the same conclusion, it seems.
"I get e-mails from adventurous young people saying, 'Wow, I never realised how much pain my parents would go through if something were to happen to me.'"
Others, however, saw it more as a celebration of the bond between fathers and sons. "There are fathers who appreciate what I wrote and said, 'It inspired me to be a better father and do more things with my kids.'"
