Vandalized gate led to fatal journey

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – Vandals had cut the lock on a gate that should have stopped the Kim family of San Francisco from taking the spur road that led to a deadly wilderness ordeal, the Forest Service said Thursday.

“That road is gated for the winter, and it was gated on Nov. 1,” said Patty Burel, a spokeswoman for the service and the federal Bureau of Land Management. “During the search for the Kim family, it was discovered that the lock had been cut off, and the gate opened.”

Burel said there was now a “law-enforcement investigation into this vandalism that may have contributed to this tragedy.”

“Vandalism,” she said, “is a huge problem on all our federal lands.”

Still, in a perverse twist to the tragedy, the Kims were just a few miles from potential salvation that lay along the detour: a seasonal fishing and rafting lodge near the end of the spur road.

Though closed for the winter, the remote Black Bar Lodge has provisions that could have helped the family through their wait for rescue in the freezing wilderness, had they come upon the property and broken in, said the owner, John James.

“There is firewood there; there’s plenty of canned food,” said James, whose family has owned the lodge for 45 years. “There could have been a different outcome. Certainly the shelter was way more adequate than being exposed out in a car.”

James Kim, a 35-year-old Internet journalist, was discovered dead Wednesday in the Big Windy Creek, near the Rogue River here in the coastal range of southwestern Oregon.

That was four days after he had set out in a desperate bid to seek rescue for himself, his wife and his two young daughters after the family got lost Nov. 25 in the rugged terrain while on a vacation.The wife, Kati Kim, 30, and the two girls – Penelope, 4, and Sabine, 7 months – were discovered alive Monday near the family’s stranded Saab station wagon by a helicopter search and rescue team. The family had run out of food and used all their gasoline, then burned the car’s tires in an effort to keep warm. Kati Kim drank snowmelt and nursed her children but, after a week, James Kim decided to try to hike out to seek rescue.

Kim, discovered face up in the creek, died from exposure with hypothermia, Dr. James Olson, a deputy state medical examiner, said Thursday in announcing autopsy results. But Olson said he could not yet determine the exact time of death.

Had the federally supervised gate been properly locked, the Kims may have continued backing down the main Forest Service road on which they had been traveling, known as the Bear Camp Road, a steep, rocky, at times one-lane byway that is nonetheless correctly depicted on road maps as a paved link from here to the Oregon coast.

They had stopped in that road when rain turned to snow, and rocks in the roadway had forced James Kim to get out of the car a few times and remove them.

Even if they had stopped right there for the night, they would likely have been found within a day or two, lodge owner James and local authorities say.

But, as they were backing up, they came upon the spur road and decided to take that, perhaps thinking it was a quicker way to safety since it slopes downhill toward the Rogue River.

“It’s human nature to try to stay on the low road in that kind of a situation,” said James, the lodge owner. “Unfortunately, the low road in this case goes nowhere.”

While that road should have been locked shut, James said, it was not particularly uncommon for the lock to have been destroyed.

“These are federal lands and there’s a certain mentality here that goes, ‘You can’t lock me out of this, I’m a citizen of this country and I can go where I want,’ ” James said of the vandals.

The Bear Camp Road is often closed in the winter and several advisory signs along the route taken by the Kims warn that it “may be closed” due to snowdrifts ahead. But it was not officially closed on the night the family drove along it. In light of the tragedy, local and federal officials say, the signage along the road will almost certainly be changed. At least two other motorists have died in the last 12 years after getting stranded off of Bear Camp Road.