Pants Possible Clue In Canyon Search
Searchers scouring a rugged canyon Tuesday found a pair of pants matching the description of those worn by a missing man who struck out for help after his family's car got stuck in the snow.
A helicopter with heat-sensing equipment joined other helicopters, snowmobiles and foot patrols Tuesday in the hunt for 35-year-old James Kim of San Francisco. His wife and two daughters were found Monday after being lost for more than a week.
Searchers found the pants Tuesday afternoon.
"It could be a sign he's trying to indicate the path he was going," Lt. Gregg Hastings of the Oregon State Police.
The search for James Kim took on new hope and new urgency in the forests of the Oregon Coastal Range, reports CBS News national correspondent John Blackstone. The 35-year-old technology editor has now been missing for 11 days. But Monday's rescue of his wife Kati and their two young daughters, all in good condition, shows survival against the odds is possible.
Officials said it appeared Kim was within five miles of the car he'd left Saturday morning wearing only tennis shoes, pants, a sweater and a jacket. Trackers had followed his footprints until dark Monday night.
Searchers said he had headed downhill and apparently walked out of an area covered with snow toward the Rogue River. Search and rescue teams checked the river with rafts Tuesday.
Kim — whose family told rescuers he had some outdoor experience and had eaten berries while stranded, not knowing if they were poisonous — took two lighters with him when he left the car, Anderson said. "Maybe he got a fire going," he said at a news conference.Click here to see the rescue photos
Overnight temperatures have been in the mid 20s to mid 30s.
The helicopter that spotted the Kati Kim, 30, and her daughters Penelope, 4, and Sabine, 7 months, was a private aircraft contracted by the family, reported CNET, where James Kim is an editor.
"We're relieved and we have some moments of joy," Kati Kim's father, Phil Fleming, told The Early Show. "At this time, I can only think and worry about the safety of my son-in-law, and from all I've heard, he's just a heroic father."
Penelope and Sabine were airlifted to Three Rivers Community Hospital in Grants Pass, Ore. The three are in very good condition, Linda Rankin, vice president for patient care at the hospital, told The Associated Press Tuesday morning.
Kati Kim might lose a toe, Fleming told The Associated Press on Tuesday as he and his wife, Sandy, awaited a flight to Oregon from Albuquerque, N.M. He said his daughter breast-fed the children to keep them nourished during the ordeal and "the children are doing extraordinarily well."
"You think about a soldier being killed or an individual in a car accident, and you often time wonder how difficult that is," said Fleming, of Gallup, N.M. "But take a whole family and subject two kids to it — it's just unbearable."
The family said James Kim left the car around 7:45 a.m. Saturday and walked back the way they had come, saying he would return by 1 p.m. if he found no help.
Before he left, the four huddled together for warmth and ran the car at night until they ran out of gas. Officials said some of the tires were burned as signal fires in a vain attempt to attract attention.
"They did a good job. They are in remarkable shape for spending nine days out in the wilderness in this type weather conditions," Anderson said.
Searchers said the key to their discovery was a "ping" signal from the Kims' cell phone, even though the remote region is generally out of cell phone range.
It's unclear if the ping was an intentional measure taken by James, a senior editor who handles technology news at CNET Networks Inc.
According to one of two cell phone engineers who honed in on the Kims, the chance of the split-second signal making it through the rugged mountains was "very slim."
"It was just a hunch that we could help. And we followed up on the hunch," said Eric Fuqua, 39, an engineer for Edge Wireless LLC who contacted authorities to offer his services in the search. Edge Wireless provides cell phone coverage in southern Oregon, and is a member of Cingular Wireless' network.
Fuqua and his co-worker, Noah Pugsley, started digging through computer records of cell phone traffic Saturday and learned that one of the Kims' cell phones had received two text messages around 1:30 a.m. on Nov. 26, the day after the family was last seen at a restaurant in Roseburg, Ore.
The engineers were able to trace a "ping" from the Kims' phone when it received the text messages. They located not only the cell tower in Glendale, Ore., from which the messages were relayed, but a specific area west of the town where the phone received them.
With the family's possible location narrowed down, the pair used computer software to create a map predicting what parts of the mountainous region received any cell phone coverage at all.
Fuqua then relied on his extensive experience traveling the heavily forested back roads as both a fisherman and a technician, he said, to guess the course the family may have taken as they headed from the mountains toward the coast.
The engineers' sleuthing led searchers to focus on Bear Camp Road.
The family saw friends in Portland on Nov. 25 and headed toward home after a Thanksgiving trip to the Pacific Northwest. They were last spotted at a restaurant that day, and never arrived at a lodge where they had reservations.
State Police Lt. Gregg Hastings said Kati Kim told a detective the family intended to take Oregon 42, the usual route from Interstate 5 to the south Oregon coast, but they missed the turnoff, found Bear Camp Road on the map and decided to take it instead of turning back. Their car was found 15 miles from Bear Camp Road.
The complicated network of roads in the area is not plowed in winter.
James Kim covers digital audio and co-hosts a weekly video podcast for the Crave gadgets blog on CNET. The couple also own two boutiques in San Francisco.
"We are extremely relieved that they have found Kati and the kids," said Sarah Cain, a CNET spokeswoman. "We are cautiously optimistic and hopeful that it will bring more good news about James and his family."