"Epic is over-rated." Sure is - or as someone once told me, "There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots."

Hindsight is 20-20 (accounting for the commentators' retrospective perfection), but you're exactly right: mistakes don't suddenly happen, they tend to sneak up on you.

Just got reminded of that last weekend, though on a much reduced scale from what you mentioned. A group of us set out on a two-night backpack on a trail we all were familiar with - except we were walking it in a different direction, headed for the one campsite we'd never stayed at. (Camping was allowed only in designated sites. I'm starting to think that's to make it easier to get to the bodies.) Overnight rain was forecast for the first night, but temps were going to be in the 50-80 range.

We started hiking (about half an hour later than we intended), and immediately took the wrong fork in the trail - another half hour wasted.

We hadn't counted on the trail being quite so muddy from previous days' rain - we'd forgotten that this section of the trail doesn't get hiked much. It was wet, slick, and overgrown in places. Fortunately, only one person fell - but ended up with a nasty bump on her head. (Dodged a bullet there.)

It started raining about halfway to camp; no big problem - rain gear out, we hiked along in blinkered dullness. After about an hour, someone noticed we hadn't seen a trail blaze in a while. Did I mention the sun is starting to set?

Fifteen minutes of retracing our steps got us back onto the trail (total time lost: another half hour.) We arrived at the trail junction with the side trail that would take us about a mile on in to camp. It was posted with a sign: Trail Closed; Campsite C Closed. ("I thought YOU were going to call the NFS office yesterday!") It's now 7:30pm, the sun is down, and we realize that the campsite was no longer a possibility, and the potable water we were counting on there didn't exist. (We were hiking in an old mining area, where tailings had polluted all the streams in the valleys with chemicals that filters wouldn't remove. NFS fills water tanks at each campsite, and most of the group wasn't carrying filters as a result.)

We were tired and wet, water was running low, and we hadn't eaten (who wants to stop for a break or to fix supper in the rain?) We carefully considered our options, and decided to try to make the next campsite, 4 miles away. (Yes, looking back on it today, I'm not sure how careful our consideration really was - but it seemed like a good deision at the time.) On we went; several decided not to pull out their headlamps and just follow the person in front of them. They all stumbled a few times, but managed not to fall. After another hour, we found a rainpocket in some rock near the top of a ridge, noticed a nearby flat area, and decided to call it quits for the night. The two of us who had brought filters were able to filter enough runoff for everyone to cook with (we made a determination that, above the mining level using a rain-created source rather ground-sourced water, we would probably be OK.)

Finally, around 9pm, we got supper made and collapsed into our tents. (The rest of the trip was uneventful: the rain quit about 4am, we had sunny, warm skies, and everything went pretty much as planned.)

Were we ever in any serious danger? No. BUT - change the scenario to a different season, or lower the temperature by 10 or 15 degrees that first evening, or toss in a sprained ankle, or an argument about which trail to take (with someone stalking off into the night by himself, convinced he's right), and it could have gotten serious very quickly. And I can't really point to any one, isolated decision that would have pushed us over the edge - it would have just crept up on us.