On the trail, for seven anxious days

以下故事 very documented 多虧了kim 得父親是一位當地很有錢有勢的韓裔美國商人
記得很小的時候在國內看過一部影片講的是高山救險 有一對年輕的美國夫婦喜好登山但不幸中途一個
掉到一個岩壁突出來的地方困住了另一個為了去救也被困在那裡了  接下去就是營救小組開始組織營救
時間就是生命  影片有兩個線索一個是講營救小組 另一個是講這對年輕人怎樣在精神上抵抗寒冷
最後時刻 他們都出現了寒冷帶來的精神抗奮現象 這是死亡就要到來的預兆  下面仔細閱讀會發現主人公在作出決定的時候已經出現輕微的精神抗奮現象 但他的太太卻還會發現自己太weak而放棄了走出去
的決定  男人和女人在精神上這時候誰最有優勢  根據實事照片始終沒有提及女方的親人  而且值得注意
的是這是一對異族通婚  發生在男方家族是一個很有勢力的韓國家庭  很有意思



On the trail, for seven anxious days
Lawman's last week at work turns into an odyssey of hope and tears
Sunday, December 10, 2006
MICHELLE ROBERTS

Josephine County Undersheriff Brian Anderson sat down to a desk in a spare bedroom of his Grants Pass home on the quiet Wednesday evening of Nov. 29. Anderson, a 46-year-old with reddish hair, flipped on the family computer -- he's married to an emergency-room nurse and has a 16-year-old daughter -- and waited for it to boot.

He remembers thinking about the week ahead -- his last after 18 years with the Josephine County Sheriff's Office. An affable 180-pounder who stands 5 feet 8, Anderson grew up in Oregon, and he often wore Levi's relaxed-fit jeans and polo shirts to work. But, as undersheriff, he also wore a handgun strapped to his belt, ran the office's day-to-day operations and supervised the search-and-rescue team. The team's duties suit him: He's an enthusiastic fisherman and white-water rafter who enjoys Josephine County's rugged terrain.

Four weeks earlier, the undersheriff had thought he'd be moving into the sheriff's office. But in early November, he lost a bitterly fought election, and he just couldn't bring himself to work for the new sheriff. Instead of moving across the hallway, he was packing up his office for good.

 
He planned to spend the next week responding to e-mails, turning his files over to his successor and saying goodbye. After the holidays, he'd start a new job in a neighboring county.

With any luck, everything would be quiet until then.

The computer beeped as it finished booting. Anderson's eyes fell on a news bulletin about a San Francisco family that had vanished on a road trip in the Pacific Northwest. After reading that the family was headed to Gold Beach, he remembers one thought flashing through his mind: Bear Camp Road.

Anderson knew the road well. In March, he'd helped find members of Ashland's Stivers family, who'd spent two weeks snowbound in their motor home after trying to take Bear Camp Road to the coast. And in 1995, he worked the case of a salesman who'd tried to take back roads from the coast to Grants Pass. Teenagers found the man's body in his pickup. He'd starved to death.

About 8 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 25, James and Kati Kim, traveling with their two daughters -- 4-year-old Penelope and 7-month-old Sabine -- stopped at a Roseburg Denny's. After dinner they continued their trip from Seattle, where they'd celebrated Thanksgiving. They'd stopped in Portland to visit a college friend and then continued on toward Tu Tu Tun Lodge near Gold Beach, a planned stop on their trip home to San Francisco. They missed the Interstate 5 exit onto Oregon 42, the main highway to the coast. Just north of Grants Pass, they decided to try an alternate route.

Heading west out of Merlin, Bear Camp Road runs through U.S. Bureau of Land Management and Siskiyou National Forest land. The road winds over and along steep ridges, reaching elevations of more than 4,500 feet. Much of it is one lane with occasional turnouts, and signs warn of dangerous driving conditions. Sections of the road are unpaved and often get washed out.

As their 2005 Saab station wagon climbed into the mountains, the Kims ran into heavy snow. James Kim tried to back out. Running low on gas, he headed down a BLM side road, open only because vandals had cut the lock on a gate. About 2 a.m., after driving 15 miles, he reached an elevation low enough for the snow to become rain, and he stopped to wait out the storm. Attempts to call out with a cell phone failed. When the Kims woke later that morning, their all-wheel-drive vehicle was hopelessly stuck in thick, deep snow.

On the trail, for seven anxious days
 
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Brian Anderson remembers that at midmorning Thursday, Nov. 30, a Portland police officer called to ask that Josephine County deputies look for the Kims along Bear Camp Road. Anderson dispatched two deputies, who drove west through heavy snow to the crest of the road. They saw no sign of the Kims.

Meanwhile, Curry County searchers started up the same road from the east. But the snow from that direction was so thick that they made it only seven miles.

Josephine County owns two Sno-Cats, tracked vehicles that can travel over deep, soft snow. Anderson called in several s search-and-rescue workers and sent one of the Sno-Cats grinding over the mountain pass. It went all the way through. Nothing.

 

"They could be anywhere," Anderson remembers saying of the Kims. "Anywhere."

In the coastal mountains, it snowed heavily through Sunday, Nov. 26, and the Kims stayed in the car, occasionally running the engine to use the heater. They did the same over the next two days as snow fell on the quiet mountain.

James Kim read to his children every night, acting as if the family were just on a camping trip. The Kims melted snow in their mouths for water and rationed the few jars of baby food and jelly they had with them. When that ran out, Kati nursed both girls.

On Wednesday, Nov. 29, the family ran out of gas and started a fire with magazines, but the available wood was frozen, heavy and hard to gather. The next day, they turned to a spare tire for an afternoon fire. On Friday, they removed the four tires from their car and, by 11 a.m., had stoked a blaze they hoped would attract attention. By afternoon, their fire was out. They heard the chop of a helicopter in the distance. Then the sound grew softer and disappeared.

Saturday morning, Dec. 2, the couple studied a map and estimated the town of Galice was on a river four miles east. James Kim hoped to get to a road with cars on it or follow a river to the town. In reality, the Rogue River hamlet was 15 miles away, separated by four other steep creek drainages and mile upon mile of treacherous terrain.

Early Saturday morning, James Kim built a fire for his family and promised he'd return by 1 p.m. if he didn't find help. Then he kissed them goodbye.

Brian Anderson's home phone rang before 9 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 3. Still groggy after staying up late to watch his beloved Oregon State University Beavers beat Hawaii 35-32 two time zones away in Honolulu, he reached for the phone and heard Sara Rubrecht, county emergency services manager. Hey boss, Anderson remembers her saying. It looks as if they've narrowed the area where that missing family might be.

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At 1:45 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 26, the night the Kims became stranded, two brief text messages had passed through a cell phone tower and were delivered to the Kims' mobile phone. A Medford man working for Edge Wireless found records of those messages and figured the family was within 20 miles of the cell tower, narrowing the search area.

State police also had information that the Kims last used a credit card at a Roseburg Denny's just after 8 p.m. on Nov. 25. The family had ordered a children's macaroni and cheese, a Boca Burger and a chef salad.

It was Anderson's day off, and Rubrecht knew he was trying to ease through his last week on the force. Still, she asked him whether he wanted to attend a meeting at the sheriff's office with Lt. Brian Powers of the Oregon State Police. Anderson didn't think twice. He pulled on a pair of blue jeans and his black sheriff's jacket and drove five blocks to the sheriff's office, where Rubrecht and a state police officer waited.

 
 
There, on a conference table, lay several maps produced by the Edge Wireless technicians. The 11-by-17-inch pages were a maze of triangles and shadings, and Anderson didn't know what to make of them.

They called a technician at home, and he drove from Medford to Grants Pass, where he explained what the shadings on the map represented. The area included parts of Josephine, Douglas, Coos and Curry counties. But at least there was someplace to search. And there was no denying a big chunk of it fell on Anderson's turf.

Up to then, no one had been clearly running the operation. "There was some frustration on the search originally," Anderson said later, "because there was no clear-cut agency in charge. Portland PD. San Francisco PD. In Oregon, you've got no agency that is coordinating."

Anderson quickly set up a command post at the Josephine County search-and-rescue headquarters and invited everyone to meet there to pull information together. They ramped up for a full search Monday morning, Dec. 4.

He knew he faced extreme pressure and scrutiny, with "a lot of eyes" watching his every move. He'd heard that James Kim's father, Spencer Kim, a powerful Korean American businessman from Los Angeles, had flown in on a private jet and had hired private helicopters to fly over the area. National media were assembling, too, and because of James Kim's high-tech connections -- he was a senior editor at CNET Networks Inc., a technology-themed Web site -- the Internet was alive with comment and speculation. This was going to be big.

Anderson called his wife late Sunday afternoon. "I'm not going to be home for a while," he told her.

Just an hour after her husband hiked away on Saturday, Dec. 2, Kati Kim heard and saw more helicopters. The hour when her husband had promised he would return -- 1 p.m. -- came and went. She thought about walking out herself but realized she was too weak to carry both girls.

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James Kim backtracked along the BLM road they had traveled a week earlier. After five miles, where the road crosses Big Windy Creek, he climbed down into the drainage, dropping a pair of gray pants a quarter mile from the road. Then he continued another quarter mile, down to the creek.

He followed the creek east, back toward the family's car. Two miles later, he dropped several more pieces of clothing and bits of his map. He laid the clothes out in a straight line, and tucked a red T-shirt beneath a log. Deputies later found an indentation in the wet ground, where they believe he slept for a night.

The next morning, 100 searchers, including those flying Carson Logging helicopters, swarmed the search area. At 1:45 p.m. Monday, Dec. 4, a helicopter pilot spotted Kati Kim, waving a pink umbrella. Rescuers landed and picked up the mother and her daughters.

 

Whoops of joy rose at the command center. But the elation was short-lived. "We were happy," Anderson remembers, "but we immediately refocused our thoughts on one question: 'Where's James?' "

The crews looking for James Kim had to cover steep ground blocked by downed trees, heavy brush and the occasional sheer-faced cliff. And they had to cross and recross Big Windy Creek when obstacles stopped them.

By nightfall, authorities were throwing everything they could into the search. Two Jackson County sheriff's deputies tracked Kim's footprints in the snow. Searchers in Sno-Cats drove the roads. An Oregon Air National Guard helicopter equipped with night-vision and heat-sensing equipment flew a five-mile stretch of the drainage. The sensors picked up two "hot spots." One was probably too big to be James Kim. But the other?

"We are operating under the assumption that he is alive," Anderson told the news media that evening. "We are so close."

Anderson gave an interview to Larry King and stumbled into bed sometime after midnight. He'd have to get up in less than five hours. Haunted by the reports of hot spots in the snowy creek canyon, he tossed and turned and woke on the hour.

Behind his closed eyelids, he saw competing images. In one, he imagined shaking James Kim's warm hand. In the other, he saw Kim lying in the snow, cold and still.

On Tuesday, Dec. 5, searchers in Windy Creek Canyon found the gray pants, setting off media speculation that, in the final stages of hypothermia, James Kim was shedding clothes because he thought he was hot. Then searchers came across two gray long-sleeved shirts, a red short-sleeved T-shirt, a wool sock, a girl's blue skirt and pieces of an Oregon map, all deliberately lined up.

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It was good news, Anderson remembers thinking. James Kim was still moving. "But it was so frustrating," Anderson said. "We just couldn't seem to get in front of him."

That afternoon, Anderson received a call from Spencer Kim. He wanted to come to the command center to see what was going on. State police troopers sneaked him past throngs of reporters and photographers by having him duck down in the back of a squad car.

The command center grew silent when Spencer Kim walked in. Small, but with a commanding presence, he approached those staffing the post, looked in their eyes one by one and said, "I am Mr. Kim. Thank you."
 
 
Even though this was Anderson's command center, the undersheriff remembers that Spencer Kim came across as the one in charge. All his resources, Spencer Kim said, were at the search team's disposal.

The searchers told him about the items they'd found. "I know my son," he said. "I know what he's trying to do."

Then he turned and looked at Anderson and Lt. Powers. "I'm counting on you," he said.

That night, Anderson was high on adrenaline. Back at his Grants Pass house, he heated a bowl of chili in the microwave and told his wife he still had hope. "I think we can do this," he said. "I think we can bring him back alive."

The next morning, Anderson was frantic to get helicopters back into the air. But thick fog brought everything to a halt until midmorning. Not long after the first helicopter lifted off, rescue workers spotted a motionless form in Windy Creek Canyon.

A Carson helicopter dangled Jackson County SWAT team members Grant Forman and Rick Mendenhall about 100 feet above where James Kim was spotted. They gripped the bright yellow rope tightly as they were lowered into the gorge.

Forman, scanning the scene from the air, concluded Kim was dead and called in what they'd seen. Anderson heard the dispatch, and the room fell silent around him.

On the trail, for seven anxious days
 

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Everyone moved into the radio room. The dispatch crackled over the airwaves: "Subject located." It was the prearranged code that meant James Kim had been found dead. If he'd been alive, the code called for "subject located -- we need medical."

Kim lay motionless in a shallow pool of water, his head brushing against a rock and his body slightly submerged in Windy Creek's clear waters.

The helicopter lowered a red-orange Stokes basket with a camera and other equipment attached. Forman and Mendenhall gently placed the basket on some rocks a few feet from the body. Forman picked up the camera. It wasn't a crime scene, but he took care to snap pictures from every angle.

 
Then they covered Kim with a blanket and placed him in the basket. The helicopter lowered the rope and lifted the basket toward the sky. Kim's body dangled high above the forest that had hidden him for 12 days.

Media reports about the grim find went out almost immediately. Anderson worried that Kati Kim would hear about her husband's death on television, and he frantically tried to arrange for somebody to deliver the message face to face. His fears were well placed. The news flashed on the screen of a TV in the room where Kati was waiting with a friend. The friend saw the flash, but Katie missed it, and the friend quickly turned off the set.

About an hour later, Anderson stood before a throng of reporters and issued what would be his last official statement with the Josephine County Sheriff's Office: "At 12:03 today, the body of James Kim was found in the Big Windy Creek."

It was the only sentence Anderson could muster. He broke down, dropped his head, and turned from the bank of microphones to hide his tears.

Reporter David Austin of The Oregonian contributed to this report. Michelle Roberts: 503-294-5041. [e-mail]