He's not a hero.

First, some bona fides: your blogger has been a member of two different search and rescue teams in two different parts of the country, and has the excellent DOD Winter Land Survival course under his belt, so I'm not talking through my hat here.

The deceased Mr. Kim, known now in every corner of the country for getting his family stuck on a summer-only road in the winter, and having the trip turn into a lethal (for him) survival exercise, WAS NOT A HERO.

The press, and especially the Oregon State Police's PIO, Lt. Gregg Hastings, needs to stop lauding him to the skies.

Here is a short, and probably incomplete list of his failures:

1. A computer wizard, he nevertheless trusted an in-car GPS navigation system known to have a flaw of failing to account for the class of a highway when recommending a route of travel to the operator. Since his geek specialty was evaluating consumer computer electronics, he should have known this flaw.
2. He set out on the cross-wilderness trip without clearly telling anyone what his route was, only giving a rough time when he was supposed to be in Roseburg, OR, his destination.
3. He depended on cell phone communications, but never turned around when they weren't available in the mountain wilderness.
4. He failed to equip his vehicle for the trip. He lacked the required traction devices, any and all of which are legal to use in Oregon.
5. He failed to brief himself on the elevation of the mountain roads he was to traverse.
6. He failed to brief himself on the weather forecast, which had been broadcast as low-elevation snow for the previous week, and maybe the previous 10 days by NOAA.
7. He failed to have a proper on-board winter survival kit.

OK, those are just some of the mistakes he made BEFORE HE EVER LEFT SEA LEVEL at Gold Beach. If he had just showed his gizmo-planned route to any of the locals on the coast, any of them would have advised him that anything less than a 6X6 army Deuce, with full 6 wheel chains, wouldn't make it.

WHAT DOOMED MR. KIM IS THAT HE NEVER ASKED A LOCAL PERSON ABOUT THE ROUTE.

So, he sets off up into the mountains. He makes a few more mistakes:

1. Almost immediately out of Gold Beach, he is on US Forest Roads. That should have told him something. They also have US Forest Roads in CA, and most of them become impassable in the winter, at those elevations.
2. The road climbs, and he runs into snow conditions. There are NO signs telling him that he has just crossed a summit, in fact, there are many snowy summits to cross on this route, and he hasn't gotten to the top of the first one yet. Time to turn around, BUT HE DOESN'T.
3. The road quickly deterioriates in class and quality. It started at sea level as a two-lane blacktop highway, but then became two-lane partially-paved, then unpaved one lane with turnouts. At some point, he want through at least one open gate, and actually changed from the main road to a secondary logging road, BUT HE KEPT GOING.

Mr. Kim now gets stuck in the snow. he has no idea where he is, and his cell phone has no signal. He is now in a survival mode, with his wife, an infant and a toddler. He does a few things right from this point, but mostly he doesn't, and he eventually dies. Here's what he SHOULD HAVE DONE:

1. Once you make the decision you are in a survival situation, you need to put a survival plan into place. At a minimum, your plan (under winter conditions) needs to consider keeping warm, keeping hydrated (can't keep warm while dehydrated) and communicating with potential rescuers. Food isn't important, since you can live for at least a week without it, if you are hydrated and warm. Some have lived 30 days without it.
2. First thing: the communications. You have to do it while you have the strength. On a snow-covered road, you have to build tree-limb contrast signals to alert aircraft. You have to keep those signals contrasty by periodically shaking the snow off the darker boughs. You need to set an instant flare-fire up. Not light it, you do that when you hear an aircraft, you set it up for instant lighting with flares, fuel or somesuch. A "tree-torch" is best, that is, you find a smallish evergreen with dying or dead needles on it, and build your pre-fire under it. When you touch it off, the tree bursts into flame immediately, and pours black smoke (good contrast) into the sky, and a tower of flame erupts as well, very visible to aircraft even miles away. You won't burn the forest down, all the other trees have snow on them, and the rescuers are trained to look for these signals.
3. You collect firewood, methodically. You collect far more wood than you think you will ever burn, and you start a sheltered fire that will not blow out, AND YOU TEND THAT FIRE. You don't stay out in the cold with that fire, you are going to stay in the car since it protects you from the wind, but you keep the fire going because it makes an INFRARED SIGNATURE. That signature can be seen by search aircraft (the Army Reserve up here flies an aircraft that is designed to look for the heat signature of a clothed person, and it will see anything making more heat even better). It will probably NOT see the heat signature of a few bodies in a snow-covered car.
4. You make it a religion to keep warm. You don't get out and wander around just "to keep the blood stirring", since every time you get out of that car, you get cold, and the cold will kill you, eventually.
5. You keep your mind active, and you keep discussing your situation with your mate. You never give up, you discuss every little thing.

At some point, Mr. Kim decided he was going to trek out for help. Had he known where he was, seven miles from a summer fishing lodge, he could have walked down there, found the lodge on the shore of the Rogue River, got in, fired up the stove, got some hot liquids and food imto himself, and hiked back up the mountain for his wife and kids. They would all be alive today, because the searchers in the jet boats would have found them.

Kim's decision to trek out killed him. After trekking an amazing 16 miles in poor condition, he came to his end, having walked a circle back to within almost shouting distance of his car. He did all the supposedly "right" things, he walked downhill, and followed drainages. He was within yards of the mainstem Rogue River when he died. He was within seven miles of that summer lodge when he died.

THE MAN DIED BECAUSE HE HAD NO CLUE WHERE HE WAS. HE SHOULD HAVE NEVER STARTED OUT ON HIS TREK.

All those who are apologizing for his death need to realize that he killed himself, he brought the whole situation on himself.

What do we have today that makes us different from generations before us?

INFORMATION. This is the Information Age. The Information that would have saved Mr. Kim would have been on a Forest Service Map, sold for a nominal charge at any Forest Service office, of which there is one in Coos Bay, near to where he left. The other information is the local type, which is what all the generations before Mr. Kim had to rely upon. He never consulted any of that information. The last bit of information is in the form of high-tech communications. If Mr. Kim really wanted to be a cross-country navigator, he needed a satellite phone. If he had one, he would have never gotten wet or cold, but could have whistled up some help long before the gas tank in his vehicle ran dry. Being a consumer electronics whiz, he had to know about SatPhones.

Mr. Kim just didn't think, and so he died, and almost killed his whole family.

And some still call him a hero?

Comments

[PN]

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-PN

The biggest mistake he made in my book is one that I complain about with the truck drivers I work with every day ... Why did you ever get off the main road? Interstates go from one side of our country to the other, and all you have to is pull out a freaking map.. And if your too cheap to buy one you can check Google or Yahoo and print the stinkin' map out!

[anonymous]

I can sum it up in three words:

Evolution in action.

P.S. I wish this was Dugg. For the last several weeks they've been deifying this dumb twerp. Rivrdog has the *BEST* analysis I've seen on this whole sad sorry story. But he's so un-PC it won't make any list but a list of cranks.

State of our world...

[DirtCrashr]

I can't believe he left the roadway. All he really needed to do was walk out on the road to the big-road. There's never anything, nothing-nothing-nothing good about bushwacking off the beaten track out in the woods - it's a really bad idea in the wet, and in the cold it's worse, and in the wet-and-cold that way lies only death. He took the death-path.

[Rivrdog]

Excellent commentaries, good readers, excellent.

GOH, it'll be worse. When the Widow Kim gets back to the Silicon Valley, there will be a line of lawyer's limos around her block.

They will want her to sue everyone, the USFS, the GPS equipment maker, the Josephine County Sheriff (for not patrolling enough to keep locks on the snow gates).

These sleazesters will want her to blame and try to extract $$$ from everyone, everyone that is except herself, and SHE BEARS SOME RESPONSIBILITY FOR HER HUSBAND'S DEATH.

As to the scholarship fund, it was started almost a week ago in the Big Bank here in Oregon.

Sisters of Sob, we have a winnah!

[Homer]

Oddly enough, I read Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Larry Gonzales over the weekend. Excellent book. It explains why people do stupid stuff outdoors that gets them killed; a lot of it is hardwired into our brains, and takes a certain degree of effort to overcome with logical thought, which many - if not most - people don't know how to do. Certainly the Weekend Warrior types don't, and judging by the number of experts (mountain climbing, surfing, etc.) whose disaster accounts pepper the book, humans in general find it difficult. Consistent among all was the reluctance, perhaps the intellectual inability, to stop moving forward and backtrack to a known point of safety, not to mention the egregious planning failures.

When he taught me to fly my old man gave me three rules: if the engine is running and the wings are attached you have lots of options; the air under the plane is worth a lot more than the air over it; some days the best choice is to execute a 180 and try again tomorrow, because takeoffs are optional, landings aren't.

There have been any number of instances where I've executed that 180 and declined invitations to participate in something because, like Paul above, I concluded the probability of winding up at the epicenter of a shit storm is too high. Jeans, sneakers and a half-liter of Perrier work at the mall, but not in the woods.

[Light & Dark]

The thing that pisses me off most about all the 'hero' crap (it happens up here in the mountains a lot too) is that it encourages lay people to think that what he did is proper procedure. The next time one of them finds themselves in such a situation, whether stupidity-induced or not, they're only gonna remember the hero part of the story and do the same thing. And maybe their family won't get off quite so well.

A big part of it, as I find around here quite a bit, is that 'modernised' folks simply have no understanding or respect for the outdoors anymore. They don't take advantage of the resources available (or heaven forbid actually take some appropriate training) because they just assume that everything will be fine 'because it should be'. They don't think anything should be that hard.

I'm to the point now that, when invited to go hiking or XC skiing with somebody new, I email them a list of essentials I expect them to bring. I used to feel uncomfortable about doing this because it seemed so presumptuous and more than a little nannyish. But now, if somebody gives me crap about what I've told them to bring, I just decline participation in the trip, because I have no intention of being left to take care of them when they can't take care of themselves. Sure I never get invited back, but then, why would I want to be?

I've spent way too many trips taking shit at the trailhead for showing up with a pack full of extra food & water, rain gear and a full first aid/repair kit for a 6 or 7 hour hike or ski. But then those are the same dehydrated folks drinking my water, eating my rations, and looking morosely at me as I change into a fresh pair of socks and a dry shirt at the summit or lunch stop.

As long as the press keeps misreperesenting these situations, we're gonna have more and more people thinking heroics is the way to deal with survival situations, instead of good sense and preparation. And people are going to keep on dying needlessly.

Cap'n, I have a great deal of respect for your emergency and survival training. I would never have thought of the infrared properties of a fire for identification purposes. Learn somethin' new every day around here!

Paul

[BobG]

Have to agree with you. The least he should have done is start a big smoky fire that would be seen by searchers. For a tenderfoot to go hiking about in the wilds in winter is insanely stupid.

[Grumpy Old Ham]

"All those who are apologizing for his death need to realize that he killed himself, he brought the whole situation on himself."

There's the money quote, as far as I'm concerned. I was thinking the along the same lines when I heard "the rest of the story". Not only did he not follow the checklists, he apparently left them and the Dash One back at Base Ops.

Call me a heartless b*st*rd, but some nutjob will probably set up a scholarship for "his poor kids", thus further rewarding undesirable behavior.