Anatomy of a typical wilderness death.

What often happens to cause a lethal problem is more than one failure chaining together to cause the problem. Multiple failures of which any one was minor by itself but all together were catastrophic. For example:

You didn't bring a map and compass or don't know how to use them.
You didn't familiarize yourself with the terrain in advance or the foliage is so dense you can't see anything. Or fog comes in. All the same thing.
Your GPS was either left behind or it failed or you don't really know how to use it.
It was so cloudy you couldn't use solar or stellar navigation or you don't know how.
You went off trail. Or took the wrong fork in an area with lots of choices.
You didn't mark your off-trail route and your return path is not clear.

Now you are well and truly lost. If you had avoided any one of these failures, odds are you would not be lost. From here you can build another chain of events that leaves you dead.

You didn't leave a detailed map and itinerary and instructions with someone.
Or the person you left the map with didn't take your instructions seriously. Or you went so far off-trail the map didn't matter.
No signaling devices - or it failed.

Oops! Now you are really FUBAR.

Didn't check weather in advance. Or ignored it.
Didn't take foul weather gear in areas subject to unpredictable foul weather
Didn't turn back when weather started to change.
Didn't try to establish a shelter before it hit.
Didn't bring appropriate fire making tools.

Now you are soaking wet with no source of heat in the middle of the night during a cold, windy downpour. You may survive until morning. Or you may not.

Dawn arrives. Somehow you are still alive. You are still hypothermic and lost. Because you messed up in the list above, nobody is coming to find you. Because you went off trail in a fit of overconfidence, finding your way back will be dumb luck. And just maybe in your shaky hypothermic state, you are now not thinking straight and are incapable of fine motor skills.

Oops again! In your clumsy efforts to find the trail, you slip on a wet surface, Such a slip can cause really bad things to happen. Now you are immobilized or maybe soaked in snowmelt from a creek crossing. And now you die regardless of how fit you are.

Lots of points of failure daisy-chained together. No one thing killed you. Probably no two or three things killed you. But several low-risk failures chained together and you are dead.

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Anatomy of a typical wilderness death.