I still feel I'm missing something in that story. 7 am start, and calling for help at 8:20 am after 7 miles? Doesn't sound like a backpacking trip, so maybe they were day hiking. I'm also wondering if the reporter just got the timeline wrong, and that maybe they had started on Saturday.
Anyway, I'm a Boy Scout leader. Weather is the toughest call to make. Sounds to me like people in the area are saying that snow wasn't expected, just rain. I do think we would have tried to hike it out, if the timeline in the article is true, at least until I started seeing the very early signs of hypothermia.