Huh. You're painfully right. It makes for a good story, but the mail carrier and the head guide that summited much, much too late weren't stupidly making fatal decisions (they were), but instead they were fated to keep going until they couldn't. Nobly (stupidly, because empathy) the guide stayed with the mail carrier to his demise. I hadn't thought about it, and you're clearly right.Regardless of the circumstances, Krakauer will arrange the narrative such that death is preordained, fates conspire and nobility is stamped out by an unthinking universe.
From a narrative standpoint it makes perfect sense. We want our lives to be interesting. We want everyone's lives to be interesting. Drama masks aren't "mild contentment" and "self-satisfied smugness" they're ecstasy and tragedy. Everyone has heard of The Perfect Storm. The characters they all remember, the characters at the center at the book, the characters we're all made to care about are the hapless fishermen who don't survive the storm. The couple in their known-to-be-unsinkable sailboat that (ohmygod) had to call the coast guard for rescue when the storm is so aggro their boat actually takes on water? Went and got the boat the next day. Fucker's still floating. Nobody has heard of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, about plodding engineers that recover unrecoverable treasure from the deep ocean, even if they've heard of the SS Central America. Nerds read about success. Normies read about failure. Krakauer is just the greatest cheerleader for failure in modern literature.