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I'm one of those almost retards. 45 years ago,, we hiked the backside of Baldy from CA Highway 2 in late September and get to the summit late afternoon. Now, there's no snow to speak of, but we need to get back before it gets dark and the area we're hiking is wilderness and on the way back, we see a male Bighorn which stops us in our tracks in amazement since we're only 40 miles from downtown LA as a crow flys. We're walking along a knife edge trail, where going off the trail more than 5 or 6 feet could lead you to start sliding or worse start tumbing down a 2000 foot slope. The sun is setting, but not a big deal as the contrast is pretty good from remaining dusk and we're 15 minutes from the trailhead.
Then the fog rolls in from out of nowhere and suddenly we can barely make out the trail and in another five minutes we can't even make out the ground (there was no moon that evening) Neither one of us had thought to bring a flashlight, and while we made jokes about the situation, the fear was there. It took an hour to make it back and what saved our ass was that knife edge and some Brownian motion, that told us when the trail was getting too steep to try a less steep direction. We made it back to the trailhead and on the way back didn't really talk much on the way back be a use we both realized how fucking stupid we acted that we could have died by sliding or freezing to death.
A few weeks later, we read story about two folks who were walking along that section during the day after it had snowed and had slid to their deaths. It was one of those moments where we both looked at each other and realized that we could have done that, too, without thinking about the hazards.
I can only add, that the best teaching moments when you're young is when something almost fatal happens, and your frontal cortex goes: "U DUMB FUCK!". As you get older though, especially when you have kids, those idiot thoughts decrease.
FYI, I later did CDT thru NM. Better outcome.
