Jumping out of a slide box and navigating back

I have a use case where I need to leave a slide box and navigate back. Current behavior, if you are on the 2nd of 4 slides and you click out, the back navigation returns you back to the page (re-initializing the controller) and putting you on slide 1.

What comes to mind is to retain the current slide # and return to it in the controller. This is very similar to retaining scroll position. I believe that I read somewhere that Ionic was doing this automatically. If that is the case, how and where? Maybe, I could push the slide index onto the navigation stack.

I would need to create a stack to maintain nested click aways.

As you may have seen from another one of my topics, I have been able to achieve an integration of a slider and route navigation (special code in controller). It would be nice to be able to push slide back data onto the route navigation stack.

Thoughts?