Norad45 said:
(sigh). This is the point. Your car could catch on fire, so you had better buy a fire extinguisher. You or a family member may have a heart attack -- better carry an AED. Just in case on tsunami, carry an inflatable raft and life jackets.

It is easy to jump on the bandwagon of "carry more stuff," but unless you want to take you family on vacation with an 18-wheeler, there are very hard limits of what you can carry. In the 98.6 book, Cody Lundun says that you need to be prepared to survive for at least three days. This guy more than doubled that, yet it still wasn't enough. The simple fact is that you can absolutely never prepare for everything. I would like to think that I am more prepared than the average person, yet I cannot honestly say that I would have an excellent chance of survival in such an environment for a week and a half.

The usual advice is always to "stay put." This guy also followed that advice for a whole week. He only set out after it appeared that staying put would not result in success. He did not have a crystal ball, so he could not know how soon help was coming. It is possible that his family might still be stuck out there even today. Staying put is true in MOST cases, but in some instance, it is just waiting to die. And without knowing the future, you do not know with 100% certainty which action is the right one. Clearly, the "staying put" option did nothing for a whole week, so he figured that it was time to try something different.

In short, I admire the guy and his family for lasting as long as he did. It is easy to play armchair quarterback, but it is a whole different thing to be in the game.