I saw this from a different source: .
I think the commentary in the Chronicle was a little better, but neither was very good. I think it's a pretty good example of how the Dunning-Kruger effect can blindside anyone: a very large number of folks will have done enough day-hiking that they consider themselves 'experienced', but it's such a generally safe pastime that they are never confronted with counterfactuals, and it doesn't typically occur to most of us to look for flaws in our knowledge.
Most deaths in the wilderness are those of day hikers, because of that lack of deeper awareness, but because they aren't carrying a backpack which just happens to have everything they need to weather bad outcomes.
The acute mistake this guy made was easy to identify: he didn't understand that going off his trail was a very bad idea. Not just that it made looking for him harder, but because he (like most hikers) was clueless about navigation. The chronic mistake was that he only brought what he knew he would need, not what he might need. No lighter or matches, no knife the shave tinder, no map. He was very lucky he found water.
On the PCT forums I follow (on FB), I see a huge obsession with going ultralight, and I'm not surprised at how many people never complete that trek. Luckily, most of it is so heavily peopled that even a severe gear failure isn't likely to lead to death, but those who do die are, as far as I can tell, as unknowingly incompetent with respect to risk as this professor was.
Richard