WTOP traffic reporter and photographer Dave Dildine left the studio on Sunday at 4 p.m., just as the snowstorm was beginning to ramp up again, and headed to Rock Creek Park to photograph Boulder Bridge at the golden hour. “With snow on the ground, it can cast a beautiful aura on photos,” he says. He got precisely the shot he wanted, and started trekking a mile back to his car, barely encountering anyone else on his journey as nightfall approached.

The abandoned park made for stunning photographs, but he says “a serene quiet was transformed into a scary quiet really quickly.”

He heard screams for help right before he reached the parking lot. “That’s when I saw her flailing around,” he says, of a woman in the creek. He called to her, telling her to swim towards him. He had no idea how she ended up in the freezing water and tried to assess his options.

“I didn’t know what was going on but I knew that someone was about to die in front of me and knew I had to go in,” Dildine says. She was fully submerged at this point.

After leaving his phone on the bank, Dildine waded in. He was careful not to get his head wet, but was soaked from the chest down as he grabbed her by the collar and pulled her to the shore, sliding over a sheet of ice.

From the shore, he called 911. “We huddled together while I was on the phone with the dispatcher,” Dildine says. “I was trying to ensure they had the best location possible for the rescue, but we were in the middle of the snow storm and I knew it was going to be a slow response.” As a traffic reporter, Dildine has experience receiving dispatches, and knows the kind of information dispatchers need to send along help.

He describes the 15 minutes they waited for emergency services in the deep snow to arrive as “an eternity.” He tried to keep her warm: “I was just about as wet as she was but I knew I had more time.” He says he went up to the road several times to find help, but didn’t want to leave her alone for too long as her condition deteriorated.

“She went from screaming, to moaning, to shivering, to not shivering, to unresponsive,” Dildine says. “It did not look good. She was as blue as a smurf, it was scary.”

The third time he sought assistance, he saw a group of four hikers at the same time he spotted “the faint glow of red flashing lights” in the distance, Dildine says. Three of the hikers went to guide the ambulance to where Dilane was, and the fourth helped him move the woman, who at that point was unconscious and breathing shallowly.

As the medics took her to the hospital, Dildine declined medical services and returned to his car. “I went immediately to my heat seaters and they never felt so good,” he says. But in the commotion, he didn’t exchange contact information with the hikers—whom he’d still like to connect with—and still didn’t know what happened to the woman in the snow.

Afterwards, “the storm was fading and the snow was ending, but I couldn’t sleep,” he says. He was receiving updates from emergency responders. “I got word that Jane Doe’s vitals were recovering. There were still a lot of open questions and I wanted answers.” He was also suffering from minor hypothermia—he had a splitting headache and was dehydrated.

The next day, Dildine returned to Rock Creek Park with his colleague, Megan Cloherty, to look for clues and to piece together what had happened. Cloherty spotted the woman’s belongings in the snow: earbuds, a water bottle, and a cell phone.

It was the cell phone, which still worked, that’d be key to finding the woman, who reunited with Dildine this week.

Sarah Kirkpatrick was running in Rock Creek Park that Sunday. She too was trying to take photos of the snowy scenery. As she explains in the video reunion with Dildine published by WTOP, she put one leg over the railing and was holding on with the other when she fell over. But she fell into a bank of snow, she says. She left her belongings there and tried to escape the embankment by climbing a tree branch—she slipped off the branch and into the water.

The 27-year-old Kirkpatrick estimates she was in the water 8-10 minutes before Dildine found her. She remembers him calling to her, but couldn’t move to the shore. “All of my muscles and all of my bones just felt immobilized in the water,” she recounts in the video.

Dildine says that it was “an absolute pleasure” to reunite with Kirkpatrick: “To see her reconvened with a healthier complexion was a relief. I’m just really glad she’s safe, incredibly happy she’s recovered, and I’m thrilled that there’s a happy ending that a lot of people can potentially learn from.”

While he’s reluctant as a journalist to be the subject of the story, he says that it’s an opportunity to remind people of the safety precautions to take: “Always always always strive to be as aware of your actions and your surroundings as much as humanly possible,” he says. “If you have to make a 911 call, it’s up to you to articulate where help is needed. Just saying you’re in Rock Creek isn’t good enough.”

Dildine can’t stop thinking about the timing of it all—how a choice to meditate in the snow may have made all the difference for Kirkpatrick. “It’s a little mushy,” he says. “If you believe in destiny, then this is your shining example of how the choices you make can change lives.”