"Uhm... yeah... no, none of us were ever young and stupid... no...."

But they weren't young. If this had been a group of teenagers, it would have been far more understandable. The youngest of these hikers was 49. Callous though it might seem, I think that if you've worked your way through half a century without having or developing some kind of sense, you're probably not going to die of old age, unless you've always got someone else doing your thinking for you.

It was an unfortunate incident, but not uncommon.

From Jim: "Talk about "survivor's guilt." H*ll of a way to learn the lesson..."

Many people have to learn the hard way. That's why there are so many non-profits set up to teach people not to leave a baby alone in a bathtub, not to drive drunk, not to let toddlers wander the neighborhood on their own, etc. Many of these people simply couldn't figure it out BEFORE it happened to them.

Think of it as a Stupidity Tax. Sometimes it takes everything you've got, like your life.

Sue

I wonder how much hiking they had done and in what areas and in what conditions.

The follow up article that I posted a link to mentioned that one of the survivors had done a lot of hiking in the San Gabriel Mnt's. The San Gabriels are a smaller range in S. Calif and max at ~10000'. The Sierra are a good deal further north, larger, and max at ~14500'. One can get pretty spoiled hiking at lower elevations in S. Calif. where the wx is milder and FAR more predictable than in the Sierra, particularly if one is accustomed to hiking in the mild S. Calif. fall.

Yes, they were older, but did their years include much of what they were doing? One of them was wearing cotton on a fall hike in the Sierra which makes me wonder if they really had much in the way of experience.

Speaking of age not necessarily equaling wisdom in the wild, in the summer of '07, a friend and I were hiking in the Rockies at about 11,500'. We encountered a 50 something woman of average height who was really having trouble. As it turns out, this, a pretty tough high country route, was her first backpack. She was an REI employee in Texas. She had used her employee discount and had basically all but bought out the store, leaving her, a person not in any particularly great shape, with a pack far heavier than she could actually carry. My friend and I are both experienced backpackers in decent shape, we're both younger, and both about 6' tall. We thought her pack was pretty darned heavy, even for us. How she carried that thing up over the continental divide for multiple hours at 12,000+ elevation, I have no idea. My friend and I divided her load between us and escorted her and her daughter to their camp. The woman was stumbling so bad that she fell twice, hurting her ankle and lacerating her face. We had to do first aid, carry her gear, and get them out of there. A thunderstorm was approaching. Just as we got them to treeline, all heck broke loose with hail the size of grapes, and a lot of lightning. In counting the seconds between flash and bang, I got only to the "wuh" sound in "one" when the thunderclap hit. We were right in the center of the storm. If we hadn't taken her load and gotten her and her daughter out of there, they would have been at 11,000+ feet, above treeline, exposed to the lightning strikes. Like I say, age doesn't necessarily imply wisdom in the wild.