True, it's easy to talk smart and laugh at those climbers but such things could happen to any of us. Obviously the father made several critical mistakes but that's much more obvious now with the benefit of hindsight than it was in their particular situation. With a little luck they could still have made it on their own. If they had found the trail they would probably have completed the descent, surely arriving back tired and a bit scared but with a good war story to tell. Unfortunately it didn't turn out that way.

Things go awry all the time, all the more likely if you let your ego get in the way of your judgement. We all know that's wrong but I can freely admit that it's happened to me before too, only the consequences were never so serious. Partly because I always managed to get out of a sticky situation on my own somehow, partly because I was plain lucky. Our ego often gets us in trouble. There's plenty of opportunity for that in the mountains. Everyone wants to complete the climb and get back home a "winner". I don't think anyone (males in particular) is totally immune to that.