Seems like you answered your own question; either they didn't get that advice, haven't "been hiking a lot" (or at all), or just feel like they can brute force i

Seems like you answered your own question; either they didn't get that advice, haven't "been hiking a lot" (or at all), or just feel like they can brute force it for some reason. Hiking is one of the first activities in which I learned the value of reps, as a discrete type of practice. If you go hiking once, you learn something about what you've brought with you, the conditions, different kinds of surfaces, and your own (current) physical ability, if you're paying attention. Do that many times with a little variation between each adventure, and you'll develop a generalization intuition that you can't get in any other way, including about advice itself for a given area, altitude, climate, time of year, etc.. Now that I've been a hiker for years, and continue varying my adventures—usually in the specific mountain range and trails these people were rescued from—I tend to think of different ground surfaces as a metaphor for life. Incidentally, a lot of people probably don't anticipate completely losing cell reception so close to the city.