Our team building - rafting trip- very fun, one women really twisted(maybe broke) her ankle however, so they said no more of those- Laser tag (was gonna be paintball, but they wisely rethought it), and several BBQs (with littleteam games)- and free food is always good. So, nothing too dangerous.
Yep.
A New York Times article on this mentions one thing that I don’t think was mentioned upthread; that the left-behind employee was based out of Florida, not Colorado as I assumed. So perhaps he was unaccustomed to the altitude?
You may be underestimating the challenge of the vertiginous heights of the Florida peaks, which – IIRC – max out at just under 350 feet above sea level 
Corporate headquarters, maybe? Perhaps someone in the C-suite?
He was an insurance underwriter, specializing in architects and engineers.
A few more details are coming to light:
Sounds like this was an annual event to raise money for charities – this time, for World Central Kitchen.
Global company. Likely numerous offices in various areas, and probably a few working remotely and somewhat autonomously.
A distinct possibility. When I took my bride-to-be Pepper Mill from sea level New Jersey to the national parks of Utah she got winded very easily on the hiking trails.
They may all have been unaccustomed to the altitude, even if some of them were from Colorado. Most of Colorado’s a lot short of 14,000 feet.
Which is another reason this whole thing was not a bright idea.
– and among the things altitude sickness can do to you is to screw up your ability to think. Which, come to think of it, might explain their picking up the trail markers with somebody still up there behind them.
This. If you live in Denver (or really anywhere in the front range), that’s only about 5,000 feet above sea level. 14,000 feet is a whole different thing.
Mr Stephanides stopped for a break while his co-workers continued on the route.
Officials said the hiker was left to reach the summit on his own.
He then became disoriented on the descent, “finding belongings left in the boulder field to mark the descent by the previous group having been picked up as they hiked down”.
I still don’t get this. Did he stop for a break as they were all ascending? Did he resume his attempt at the summit AFTER the others had summitted and passed him on their descent? I['m really curious at what could have transpired when he passed the others on their way down. And, if they encountered him on their way down, why they woulda removed the markers and not left a couple people to wait for him.
If we don’t get details saying this guy was a totally ripped experienced outdoorsman, I’m still crowning him chief idiot by boldly striking off by himself over 12-13k feet.
Found this on the easiest route - which I’d assume they were taking.
O.k. here’s my story: I summitted Mt. Whitney (14.5K) a looooong time ago (like 35 yrs?) with three other women. We were all reasonably fit, but Whitney is not a technical “climb.” It’s basically a hike, but at a pretty high altitude. We decided to take at least three days: two to reach Lake Consultation, one to summit, and return to the trailhead the following morning. Well, it didn’t help me acclimatize. I got a bad headache when we set up camp at the lake (about 11K). I rested that night and felt better the next morning.
From that point, you take about 100 switchbacks to Muir Pass where you cross over to the western side of the mountain, and it’s a not too long hike to the summit. Well, by the time, we got to Muir Pass, I was feeling really bad again and was vomitting. The woman who’d organized our hike was the fittest among us. She said she’d go on to the summit. The other two stayed with me. When L returned from the summit, the plan was they’d go on to summit, and L would help me back to our camp.
Heh, I wasn’t going to get that far not summit! So, I kept walking and stopping and walking and stopping. Literally about every 10 yards, I’d stop. We finally got to just below the summit (there’s a kind of “knob” on top) and just coming down was L! So, she turned around and all four of us went up (I was literally crawling) and had our summit time (and signed into the guest book – dammit! I’d barfed all over that mountain, I’m gonna sign in!). We all went down together, and I just crashed, after eating a little dinner. And it was so weird to head back to the Portal the next morning. It was like with every single step, I felt better. By the time we got to the Portal store I felt completely normal. I bought a shower, a beer, and a bag of Cheetos. Ambrosia.
Another difference with Whitney is that it’s so popular you have to reserve a spot months in advance or take a chance on spots being available when you get there. So, there’s a ton of people. Everywhere. There was a big group of boy scouts who summited the same day we did (we walked through their camp heading for the switchbacks while the leaders yelled at the boys feeding the marmots oatmeal from their mess kits), and one of the leaders sat down with me on the western side to make sure I wasn’t too bad. No one left me on my own.
tl;dr? But such a different situation. And, yes, altitude can make you sick. And it can make you dangerously disoriented. I wasn’t that bad, but it can be life threatening, for sure.
Oh, the other two women were going home to the Valley, and Land I were on the Westside, so L and I drove back to L.A. together and stopped at a coffee shop in Lone Pine and ate two giant blue cheese burgers. We earned it!
This makes it even worse:
The company where Mr Stephanides works, London-based global insurance firm Beazley, told the BBC the charity hike had been running for over a decade with many participants having done the hike before.
So… y’all’s company has been doing this for a while… and leaving personal belongings as a trail of breadcrumbs, letting individuals hike alone, &etc. is the best you can do?
Shortly before I retired, the HR department organized an obstacle race at the annual company picnic, assigning folks to teams and announcing complex rules for scoring. They were very annoyed when all the teams colluded to get everyone across the finish line simultaneously. I am inordinately proud of being one of the ringleaders of that particular initiative.
And my story:
Back in my early 30s, four of us climbed Mt. Kita, over 3,193 m (10,475 ft), with a total gain of 1,670 m (5,479 ft) compared to the total gain of 4,500 ft for this hike if @Dinsdale 's guess is correct.
Of us four , two were used to climbing 2,800 to 3,100 m mountains and I was in reasonable shape.
The plan was to climb up one day, camp near the summit and descend the next day.
The one member just was not in as good of shape and she was struggling to keep up. Our pace was significently slower that what we anticipated. The rest of us split up her load but she still was much slower. She suggested we go ahead but of course we stayed together.
Although it was summer, it started snowing and the final bit was through fog and cold wind. She would take three steps, rest for two and take three more. Rinse and repeat. By the end we were almost carrying her.
I hadn’t thought about that incident in years, but this report reminded me of it.
It’s easy to get caught up in a group who are better than you and it’s completely irresponsible for others to let someone slower fall behind. Not on mountains where the weather can change so quickly.
My guess is that they didn’t have any emergency equipment such as flashlights and he may not have had any rain gear.
ETA: We learned the necessity of flashlights on a previous shorter hike where it also took longer and we wound up finishing in the dark with only one flashlight for our people.
An actual team building exercise!
(Which apparently wasn’t what HR wanted after all.)
You deserve to be proud of that.
Been there, did that. Had a team building exercise where we took an aerial cable car up a mountain, and then hiked to a mountain restaurant for great views and typical local food.
Coming back, we ended up using our phones for lighting our pathway, which went though a dense forest. And this was in 2007 or so, which was before every smartphone came with a flashlight, so we were actually using our phone screens.
Some years later, for a different hike, with a different organizer, each person was issue a rain poncho (with the company’s logo) and a LED flashlight, which still lives in my nightstand. The rain poncho is still at my desk. And if someone didn’t want to do the hike, they were welcome to take the train either part way or all the way to the restaurant. A lot of people chose to take the train, especially as it was misting. No pressure, one way or another.
Well, if you only went as far as 10K, she didn’t have altitude-related problems, as I did. My fitness wasn’t the problem; it was the altitude. And nobody was inconvenienced by me. We all summitted, and we all returned in fine shape. I just had to get lower on the mountain!
One thing L asked us all to pack was a whistle. If we’d fallen, and they couldn’t find us, we could blow on a whistle much longer than we could yell. And a whistle sound carries much better than a voice. I thought that was really smart. Thankfully, no whistles were needed.
I have a nifty trench whistle I bought in the UK from the Imperial War Museum, a bit of WWI centennial merchandise from a visit I made in September of 2014.
It’s certainly possible to have altitude-related problems at 10K, if that’s not what you’re used to.
People with exercise-induced asthma and sickle cell trait can have problems on an airplane, which I understand is pressurized to something like 5,000 feet.
On a weekend trip to Denver from Lincoln, Nebraska (1,175) to Denver (5,280), that 4,105 ft change humbled me as far as my effort tolerance and endurance. I definitely could not have done any walking uphill from there, even though I was in a bowl of some beautiful hiking opportunities. Acclimation didn’t occur sufficiently in three days and nights to make me want to challenge that state of affairs.