I'm reticence to criticize people's choices too harshly. The likelihood of mental and physical impairment is a fact in survival situations. Fatigue, hunger, dehydration, stress, and lack of sleep make even simple tasks and choices difficult.

People starve after they forget the food they hid in the trunk. People familiar with the area turn south and spend their last hours wandering around a desolate wilderness instead of turning north and walking a short distance to a town. People who have used knives for years safely slip and bleed to death after laying open a vein. People with medical training forget what to do. Things get weird. Geniuses turn to morons.

This is one of the reasons why I'm skeptical about technical solutions to problems. Technology can fail, but humans under stress can forget how to use technology. I once forgot how to put the batteries in a little radio I used. Batteries got weak so I put in my spare set. The radio stops working at all. I put the old set in figuring they are weak but might give me a few minutes. No dice. I put the radio away and figure it is broken. I get home and find the batteries were put in backward.

I must have put batteries in that little radio dozens of time and always got it right. But in the dark, rain, and a bit of nip in the air for some reason I remembered it wrong. It wasn't a survival situation and I didn't make any great efforts to troubleshoot it. It meant of missed the last half hour of the news. No big deal. What if it was the GPS unit I was depending on and my ideas on how to troubleshoot the problem was a faulty as my memory of battery orientation. The more complicated a device is the more chance there [sp] is of getting something wrong. Simple things only go together one way.

Perhaps I'm missing something but in a lot of these situations I'm seeing a lot of materials, even assuming deep snow and weakened frame due to hunger, that could be assembled into a fire that could be built into a bonfire that it would be hard not to see. Add tires and foam from the seat cushions for smoke during the day. Gasoline for brightness at night. Go big and wait for the forest service [to] arrive. Even if it takes a week, or even two, it beats 70 days.

I also wonder how much of this might have been the desired result. A guy who has no family or friends and who has faced a lot of disappointments might give self-rescue a good try but after a bit figures no one will think worse of them if they give up.

The same people in other circumstances might go for 'suicide by cop'. Suicide by wilderness is less violent.

Edit for spelling and punctuation.