Yeah, not carrying a puffy and a light during an October elk hunt in Colorado are two pretty serious mistakes. Imagine trying to treat a injury, even a relatively minor one, without a light. The other thing is that they must have been aware of an encroaching nightfall and the fact that they didn’t have lights nor insulation. Surely they would have thought about killing an animal at dusk and needing lights of some type to deal with a kill -otherwise, why would you even go after an elk in the afternoon?
Back in Fall of 2002, I was rock climbing in Linville Gorge, North Carolina with a girlfriend. We were both highly experienced climbers and I had even done some big wall and alpine climbing. -may have even been a little bit cocky. We went out to do two very popular and also very moderate (5.6/5.7) multi pitch climbs, both of which required decents Into the gorge, the 2nd route required a multi pitch repel. I had done both of these routes several times. I had even rope solo’d one of them as well as simul climbed it with a different climbing partner in about 15 minutes. My gf and I went out with the intention of climbing both routes inside of 2 hours. I was wearing a pair of shorts (no shirt), a camel back, a light rack and a rope.
We flew up the first route, which was slightly more difficult, very quickly and rappelled back into the gorge to find ourselves stuck behind an impossibly slow and inexperienced partner. Hours ticked away before we could start climbing. We passed the slow party at our insistence and to their dissent. We climbed as fast as we could and I managed to top out just as last light faded. My GF followed the last pitch in complete darkness. With no headlamps and only a series of informal climber trails that skirted the edge of the cliff, we were left to find our way through a maze of cliff bands and rorodendrom in the pitch black. A 40 minute approach turned into an 8-10 return. Headlamp lesson thoroughly learned.