Between that and breaking your leg from the deep snow to sliding off a cliff if you stumble the least little bit, it the high sierras it is dangerous to hike thru that in a high snow year like last year and this year.
He got off trail ... if he’d stayed on trail, he still would have died ... headed for a section where he needed an ice axe & crampons to get through it & he had neither & he would not have turned back. That ice/steep section was the first SAR checked, just ‘knew’ that’s where they’d find him, at the bottom of a cliff off of that trail section, but he wasn’t there.