From that campsite, it was under two hours to the stream, with the landing strip just on the other side. With the stream in sight, we're home free! ...Not so fast. Deb tested out the water to see how deep it was, and it quickly became apparent that it was too deep (but the other side is so close!). The shorts are not because it was hot (far from it), but because the water is so silty that your pants will filter and trap silt.
The water was ice cold, having just come from a glacier, so while Deb warmed up, I scouted further up the stream in hopes of a spot where it braided enough to cross. I found a possible crossing site, and Deb went across to test it again, only this time she got partway across onto a gravel bar, and then was having trouble getting back to me and the packs because of the water dynamic (it was deep right at the far bank, so she had to step off the bank right into swift water to come back). She was pacing the gravel bar, looking for a place to cross, and I was watching her with the binoculars, watching her shiver and get colder and colder. I started panicking because I didn't want her to try to cross when she was so cold she couldn't control her legs well, but she obviously couldn't warm up in wet clothes on that gravel bar. I finally shouted at her to stay put, and grabbed my pack and crossed over to the gravel bar. I slipped at the very end, but since I was right by the bank, I fell onto the bank and Deb hauled me out. Phew!
Then I realized that even though I had grabbed the stove out of Deb's pack, I had forgotten the fuel, so we couldn't heat up any water to warm her up. We warmed up a bit with some dry clothes on top, and then took them back off, emptied my pack, and left the contents on the gravel bar, and went back across together. We found a spot where it didn't get deep so close to the bar, and then crossed together, facing each other and holding on (thanks, Kevin, for the swiftwater class -- it was a REAL lifesaver!) to keep each other steady. We put half of Deb's stuff in my pack so neither of us had too heavy of a pack, and made our way back to the gravel bar without falling into the water this time. The water was about mid-thigh, which is really hard to cross. Deb had probably been wet for thirty minutes at this point, and she was really cold. The air temperature was probably 60 degrees or so, with a little breeze to top it off. We left my stuff on the gravel bar and made our way to the other side, and were quite happy to see that the second half of the crossing was not deep at all (relatively speaking). I got Deb started on dry clothes and headed back to get my stuff, since it was easy to cross that part alone.
Deb was extremely cold, though still functioning and in high spirits. For some reason, I was not terribly cold, even though I'm always the one wearing a down jacket while Deb has short sleeves on. I boiled some water and gave her a hot water bottle to tuck inside her down jacket cocoon, and made hot drinks for us. It took a couple of hours for her to feel completely warm again, but thankfully it was a sunny day and we had a spot out of the breeze, so we did get warmed up. We were at the base of a twenty foot sand cliff, just below where we thought (and hoped) the landing strip was, but we hadn't scouted out the area yet. We didn't get moving again until less than an hour before our pickup time. We hopped up to the landing area and looked around, but saw no evidence of planes landing there. We did see some footprints, and thought that might be from someone else's pickup. And we didn't really see any other options, so we settled down in a visible place to wait for the plane.
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