WHEN THINGS CHANGE from ops normal to ops critical, nothing inspires confidence like a plan of attack. Having left our harnesses and crevasse-rescue gear at home, we find this easy: Wrap the 8mm glacier rope around our waists and then tie dozens of loops between us. If one of us falls, the other will use his ice ax to stop the fall and then use some as-yet-unimprovised method to haul the buddy up. Best- case scenario: The buddy will be able to climb out. Worst case: The buddy will dangle there, injured or dead, until his partner finally stops agonizing over what to do, cuts the rope to save himself, and flees to live out his days, haunted and hiding, somewhere in India.

We start snaking through the clamped jaws of the crevasse field, gingerly stepping over the smaller ones like businessmen avoiding puddles, giving a wider berth to the darkest envelopes. A couple of times, we're forced to backtrack and pray that our previous path didn't weaken any hidden snowbridges. But our chakra centers must be well charged, because an hour later, we're safely on a sidehill.

We've made it over the crux! Riding high, we reach the Glacier Meadows ranger station, where the ranger and her buddy are lounging outside a yurt, the first people we've seen in three days. Roo's neoprene socks squish with each step. The sections of our paddles dangle askew. With our sunburned, scraped limbs, we look like we lost a tousle with a big kitty. Our lips are flecked with brown bits of dried Nutella.

They smile, bemused, as we recount our grand traverse thus far.

I hold up an emergency ration, about to laud its caloric bounty. The man interjects, saying he's eaten plenty of S.O.S. bars in the Navy. (His advice: "Throw 'em to the bears.")

"What do you do in the Navy?" I ask.

"I'm a diver."

"No way! Roo just crossed the mountains in a drysuit!"

Before leaving, the Navy diver surprises us with an almost philosophical pronouncement. "You know, somewhere the line is crossed, and the scale tips from heroic to stupid," he says. "I'm not sure where you guys are. But I kinda like ya."

Thanks, we say, flattered—and a little taken aback. Even if we have been perhaps, on occasion, a tetch stupid, methinks once we succeed, then we're definitely heroic, right?

Whatever the case, Roo and I choose to skip our planned put-in at the tongue of the glacier, where Class IV–V whitewater courses through a cheese grater of boulders, and instead boogie eight miles downstream, where the rapids look more, well, un-stupid.