Climbing the 14,005-foot Mount of the Holy Cross does not, at a glance, sound especially fraught with trouble. It’s five miles to the summit (on the shortest trail) — granted with 5,000 feet of elevation gain and very thin air. Brutal but doable (to someone who knows what he’s doing) if it’s only five miles, I would guess. At least that’s what the two of them must’ve thought when they set out with no extra food, no extra water, no survival supplies. One of them ran out of gas about 10 minutes from the summit and implored her hiking partner go to on to the top.

He did. She hasn’t been seen since.

The guy was an experienced Fourteener who made so many mistakes you have to wonder if it was altitude sickness. No. 1) Takes the longer, harder route by accident; No. 2) He finds partner is out of water and exhausted nearly 14,000 feet up. This is an absolute, call the Rescue Patrol emergency. But he doesn’t realize it and and commits No. 3) Tells her, either wait here or start back down and I’ll meet you at point X. She took the latter choice and disappeared — probably fell into some nook or cranny of the mountain where rescuers couldn’t find her. Had he given her Choice No. 1 in any crisis — stay put till help arrives — everything might’ve turned out OK.

It’s absolutlely without question that this guy’s lapses of judgment got his hiking partner killed on that mountainside, but it’s also absolutely without question that this fact would be obvious only in retrospect. I feel for the guy because he knows. He has to.

The Denver Post story I linked to has the basic framework of what happened, but it’s hard to say what really happened. Newspapers get facts wrong all the time; it’s why they hire people like me to help keep some of ’em out of print. The guy has his side of the story; if the woman had done the smart thing and waited for him to return, she’d probably be alive today.

I usually don’t post links to lost-hiker stories; most are just boring. This one seemed a little out of the ordinary because it seems — from this distance — to be a classic example of a veteran hiker making what seem to be rookie mistakes. It might be that he actually made veteran mistakes — forgetting the basics after having gotten away with taking certain risks too many times.

People who trade in stocks and commodities deal with the reality of risk every day. Fundamental to any successful trading strategy is a “what do I do if this trade goes wrong” fallback plan. The people who go on winning streaks and set their fallback strategies aside as long as they’re in the black inevitably get burned. Fortunately, all they lose is money.

Thing is, in a risky endeavor like long-distance hiking up steep trails at extreme altitude, your mistakes will also be obvious only when it’s too late. If you go up there with no fallback plan, you’re apt to get burned, too. As this story proves, it can happen to anybody.