James Kim: What Not to Do

Last night my wife and I were channel surfing and I landed on a show called I Shouldn’t Be Alive which featured an old story from 2006 about a family on a road trip in Oregon which culminated in the father’s death (and thankfully the rescue of the other 3 family members).

These programs do not typically interest me.  I have found that since the birth of my son, tragic stories affect me significantly.  Last Friday my wife dragged me to see the Lion King in 3D to which I acquiesced only as an anniversary favor.   Now that I have become a father, it was like seeing the film again for the first time.  I have to admit, I got a little emotional at parts.  The death of Mufasa is heavy when you have a kid (who cries when you leave for work).

Anyway, back to this story about the Kims.  This story was new to me.  Here’s the leadup to their predicament:

• They are in an SUV on a road trip in Oregon following Thanksgiving. with two children, ages 4 and 6 months
• They decide (for whatever reason) to make reservations at a B&B rather than stop at a motel for the night.
• It’s already after dark and the B&B is 6 hours away
• The B&B owner tells them specifically not to come, as they are hard to find, especially after 6 hours of driving
• They decide to go anyway and barrel on.
• It’s now 10pm or so.  They realize they missed the turn about 15 miles ago.
• Rather than turn back, they pull over and pull out a map.
• Kati Kim suggests driving on Bear Mountain road, which is in the middle of the forest – this is obvious on the map by the lack of any side roads, towns, or signs of civilization for 100 miles of road.
• James and Kati ignore the sign leading onto the road which states, “WARNING, this road can get blocked by snow in the winter”, a.k.a., “Enter at your own risk”
• It starts snowing.  A lot.  They push forward.
• James makes a wrong turn on this road.  In his defense, it wasn’t so much a turn as it was a fork – he should have stayed left but instead veered right.
• Normally, the fork has a closed gate because it’s a logging road which closes in the winter, but for some reason it was open.
• The snow gets so bad that they can’t continue to drive.  Visibility is zero and traction is going to hell.
• James is exhausted, lost, and stuck in a blizzard.   They decide to park, sleep through the blizzard, and try to get going again in the morning.
• They run the car all night to keep it heated.
• In the morning they wake up to find that they do not have enough gas left to reverse course and get back to the highway; also, it is still snowing.
• They decide to camp in the car for 7 days.
• On day 8, James Kim decides to leave the car to attempt to get help, wearing only a pair of jeans.  At least he had a winter jacket.  He does not return.
• Also on day 8, a guy who works for the phone company essentially breaks the law by illegally tracking the Kim’s cell phones (after this story has made national news media) and reports the last cell location to the police
• On day 9, a private citizen with a private helicoptor who is familiar with this road decides to start searching.  He concludes there’s a good chance they may have made a wrong turn on the road and finds the car.  Kati and the 2 children are rescued.
• On day 12, the body of James Kim is discovered only 2 miles from the car.

As my wife and I were watching this story unfold, we couldn’t help but put our palms to our faces.  We’ve both watched enough Bear Grylls to know how many mistakes this family made.  I hate hearing James Kim called a hero because he’s anything but.  He and his wife were irresponsible and fool hardy.  I wouldn’t wish harm on either of them or their children – I am glad 3 of them survived – but considering the volume of poor decisions they made, it’s miraculous that any of them survived at all.  Given their choices, they really should have died.

Let’s go over the mistakes they made, one by one.

1.  Take chances in unfamiliar areas late at night in the winter with children in the car.

It’s one thing to embrace the spirit of adventure when you’re alone or with your girlfriend or wife and decide to drive into the unknown.  It’s quite another to do it when there are children in the car.  These guys decided to go far out of their way late at night where bad weather is possible just to stay at a specific hotel?  Come on.  They stopped to eat at Denny’s for crying out loud.  Is Motel 8 not good enough for them?

2.  Take a road with no obvious rest stops or signs of civiilization with giant warning signs stating that the road gets treacherous in the winter.

When I visit my parents in New Jersey, we often take I-95 even though it costs toll money and is prone to traffic simply because there are rest stops like clock work.  When you’re traveling with children, you always have to take the route that has things like toilets and restaurants.  I don’t understand the Kims’ thinking when they decided to take Bear Mountain road.  There were signs that said, “Hey, this road might be blocked by snow in the winter.”  Did they figure, “oh, it’s snowing, it won’t be blocked?”  Could they not tell that snow was in the air?  I can almost always tell when it’s going to snow.  I try not to be driving when it’s about to snow.  Could they not see that the road they were taking would take them straight into mountains?

Look, if a sign says, “this road may be blocked by snow drifts”, and my choices are to drive 100 miles down this road or turn around and go 15 miles back to take the road I’m supposed to take (the one that goes through civlization), I’ll go 15 miles back every time.  Why?  Well, aside from the reasons above, what happens if you go down Bear Mountain road, get 90 miles in, and then find that it’s blocked because of a snow drift or a fallen tree?  Plus, the Kims were already prepared to drive 6 hours to get to a B&B.  What’s another 15 minutes of back tracking?

3.  Continue driving when it began to snow.

As my wife will tell you, and as I will readily admit, I am a coward when it comes to driving in the snow.  As I tell her, so will you be after you snap an axle on a curb because your car won’t turn left in the snow.  It’s one thing to drive on an interstate when it starts to snow (don’t).  It’s entirely another to drive on a mountain pass in the snow when you’re the only car you’ve seen all night.  Even had I made all the other mistakes that the Kims made this far, the minute it started to snow on this road I would have turned to my wife and said, “I’m sorry honey, but this is not happening.  Let’s get back to the highway and find the next Motel 8.”

4.  Leave the car running all night to keep the heat on.

I can understand wanting to keep your children warm.  I really can.  However, if I found myself in James Kim’s position at this point in his story, this is how my thought process would have gone:

• I am lost on a remote mountain road on which I have seen no other cars all night
• It is snowing and I do not know how long it will continue or how deep the resulting snow is going to be
• If we can’t continue driving tonight, we may wake up tomorrow and discover that we are completely unable to move the car
• If that happens, we may be stuck here for a while
• If we are stuck here for a while, we need to conserve fuel
• If we run the car continuously, we will run out of gas pretty quick
• If we run out of gas, we have no way of rewarming our bodies.
• We’re in deep shit.

Cars are notoriously bad at heat retention.  They are not good insulators.  Too much glass.  Human bodies, on the other hand, are good insulators.  It takes a long time of protracted exposure to cold air for hypothermia to set in.  If you rewarm your body in bursts, that heat will be retained a lot better than if you try to keep the air in the car heated.  So, starting that night, I would have started the car, ran it at full heat until we’re nearly sweating, and then turned it off for an hour or so, until we’re all shivering again.  It would have been a crappy night, but with all the warm clothes they had and a lot of cuddling, it would have been doable.

Instead, the Kims probably panicked, or misjudged how much fuel is burned by idling an engine, or possibly fell victim to a 4 year old girl crying “daddy, I’m cold!”  Either way, it was the wrong choice.

The Kims should have entered survival mode the minute they realized they were snowed in on a remote mountain road.

5.  Decide to wait for rescue.

All they needed to do was get out of the car, look around, and realize where they were.  During and after a blizzard, how likely is it that another vehicle is going to come down this road?  If you can’t drive in the snow, neither can anyone else!

When you get yourself into a bind like this – especially in November where it’s only going to get colder and the snow is only going to get deeper, waiting around and hoping someone is going to stumble upon you is just about the worst thing you can do.

Still, the fact that it was actively snowing for the first couple of days means that it may have been the right thing for them to do to at least wait for it to stop snowing.  But this family waited 7 days before they decided to take action.

The problem with waiting is that from the minute you find yourself stuck in the cold, the clock is ticking.  Every minute you are getting just a little bit weaker.  Your supplies are getting lower.  Your chance of survival is decreasing – slowly at first, and then very quickly as time goes on.

They may have thought that they were too far away from anything to be able to get anywhere on foot.  If I were alone, on foot, in ideal ground conditions, I can cover 3 miles per hour pretty easily – and if my family’s life were at stake I could probably do 4.  That means that if I left at dawn, I should be able to cover 30 miles by dusk.  Even in ankle-deep snow I’m sure I could do 2 miles per hour, which gives me about 18 miles per day, give or take – and that assumes I stop at dusk.

That means even had I driven 100 miles into the mountains, I could get back to a highway in 3 or 4 days.  The Kims waited 7 before even attempting to get help.  That’s pretty staggering.  The reality is that they were about 17 miles down a logging road, which means James Kim should have been back to the Bear Mountain road in one day.

One reason the Kims didn’t take action earlier is probably because they felt as though the car offered them critical warmth and protection at night.  Kati Kim may also have whined about being left alone with the children, which is a fair concern, but James should have simply said, “Listen, our lives are at stake.  We can’t cover enough ground with the children in tow.  We need to move fast.  I can move faster and you need to feed the baby.  I might die trying to get help, but we’ll all die if we sit here in the car and expect someone to find us.”

The big concern is nighttime survival.  You can’t keep walking all night because you need sleep and it gets really, really cold.  You need to take a break and rewarm your body or you will surely die of hypothermia.  I assumed that they correctly realized this and didn’t choose to leave the car because they had no way of staying warm, and then I found later that they had matches with them.

I don’t have matches in my car, so I might have been screwed were this me instead of them.  But you have a car with gasoline, you have a lot of flammable kindling (paper) and you’re in a green pine forest.  Were I James, I would have taken the matches, taken the paper, and the car’s tire iron – it’s not an axe, but a few good whacks on a small tree branch could break it off.  Pine burns well and puts out a lot of white smoke.  I would have planned on building a fire.

The program wasn’t clear on how deep the snow was, which is a shame.  Snow makes a great insulator.  If you can dig yourself a little snow burrow, you can stay quite warm.  I remember when I was a kid I used to dig tunnels in the giant mounds the snow plow would leave at the end of the cul-de-sac.  One night I slept in one of them.  I had a sleeping bag, but I didn’t wear a coat – just sweats.  So if my fire failed, I could always make a little snow burrow.

James also failed to insulate himself properly.  Since they were on a road trip they should have had multiple outfits.  Why didn’t he put on two pairs of pants (if he had them?)  If not, why didn’t he roll up any clothes that weren’t being used to keep the family warm in the car and stuff them in his pants?  If all else failed, he should have ripped up a seat of the car and used the foam in the same way – shove them in your pants and put an air barrier between your skin and the cold air.

My biggest concern in leaving the car and striking out would be bears.  There’s really no defense against bears unless you can build a fire.  I’m not 100% sure that bears are afraid of fire.  For all I know they may be drawn to it.

So far, all of these mistakes are serious, but this one trumps them all:

6.  Try to move through the woods “as the crow flies” when you aren’t sure exactly where you are

Of all the survival blunders this family made, the one that amazes me is James Kim’s choice to pick an arbitrary direction and travel through the woods.

Out here on the east coast most of our woodlands are in relatively flat country.  He was in the mountains of Oregon, in the snow.  What was he thinking?!  It would be hard enough to navigate that country in the middle of summer. let alone in the snow when you’ve been essentially freezing and starving for 7 days already.  By the time James set out he was already depleted.

I really, really cannot understand why he did not walk along the roads.  He should have known which road he came down.  If you don’t know where you are exactly, but you’re on a road that you got to in your car, you can always, always back track.

Have you noticed that the Man vs. Wild typically ends when Bear Grylls finds a road?  If not a road, then he usually says, “okay, well I’ve found a river so it’s only a matter of time before I’m saved.”  That’s because on roads, there might be cars.  Once you flag down the first car you see, you and your family are saved.

But instead, James tried to guess where he was.  He guessed wrong.  Even had he guessed right, walking along a road, even if the road is covered in snow, is the only correct thing to do in this situation.  You will be able to move exponentially faster on a road than overland, you have zero chance of becoming disoriented and going in the wrong direction, there is less tree cover on the road which means you are more likely to be spotted from the air, and if anyone is looking for you, they’re going to start with the roads because they’re not looking for hikers, they’re looking for an SUV.

If for some reason the logging road was so covered in snow and so poorly demarcated that he couldn’t tell where the road was, at least moving in the general direction of the road would have caused him to intersect with Bear Mountain road even had he done some of the trip in brush.

The result is that James probably traveled around 17 miles in total before succumbing to exposure but was only 2 miles away from where he started.  He was essentially stumbling around in the wilderness.  Had he simply gone back the way he came – and he could have easily figured that out by the tracks his car left – he would have gone 17 miles down the logging road, arrived at Bear Mountain Road, been able to realize the mistake he made that first night (because he had the map with him and would be able to see that he accidentally veeered off onto a logging road).  I understand that even by morning the car’s tracks would have vanished, but on the first night he should have made a note of which way he came.  His car was stopped at a 3 way fork, so it would have been critical to know which of the 3 forks they came from so he could do the reverse trip.

If you can’t find a road, the next best thing is to follow the flow of a river – it will lead to progressively larger rivers and eventually people, because people live along side rivers (and because there are no trees in rivers, you’ll be more likely spotted along the bank of a river).

Ultimately, this one decision – going through brush instead of on the road – is why James Kim is dead.  For all I know, by day 7 he was already so incapacitated that he was not mentally able to think straight and make the right decision, but I didn’t get that impression from listening to his wife Kati tell the story.

It really upsets me that this program, I Shouldn’t Be Alive, did not point out these mistakes.  I thought it was common knowledge that you’re not supposed to stay in a car if you’re snowbound in the winter (because it’s barely better than being outside).  I also thought it was obvious common knowledge that when you’re lost the first thing you’re supposed to do is find either a road or a river and follow it.  The fact that he was already on a road and chose to go off the road is mind boggling, and the fact that the narrator of this program did not finish this episode with a brief bullet list is a disservice to its viewers.  Had I produced this program, I would have finished it with this advice:

• Avoid driving on remote roads in bad weather; if weather changes for the worse, turn around.
• Ration fuel from the moment you realize that you are stranded – do not wait for morning to begin conserving gasoline
• Do not wait for rescue in remote areas – prepare to hike out as soon as you realize you are in trouble
• Go back in the direction that you came along the road that you took, unless you are absolutely positive where you are and that help is closer in a different direction – but always stay on the road
• Insulate, insulate, insulate.

I strongly suspect that the producers of this show were only able to air this story by promising to portray James Kim as the heroic father who died trying to save his children instead of a dufus who made every possible mistake and broke every survival rule in the book.  Unfortunately, the truth is that he’s a dufus who made every possible mistake and broke every survival rule in the book, and that’s why he’s dead.  It’s a tragedy.  My heart goes out to him and his family.  No children should be deprived of their father.  But it needs to be said and it needs to be known so that the next family who winds up stranded in the mountains in winter doesn’t think back to James Kim and think to himself, “hey, I know, I’ll just camp in my car for 9 days and hope a helicoptor finds me.”

Also, to the haters: I am aware that hindsight is 20/20, but this isn’t the type of scenario where knowing the future would have been important.  If I were writing this in that vein I would have said that the only mistake James Kim made was leaving in the first place since had he stayed with his family for another 2 days he would have been rescued along with them and would still be alive today.

I am also appreciative of the fact that actually being in this situation is a lot different than looking back on it.  It’s entirely possible that James Kim thought of everything I am writing here today at the time but made the decisions he made for different reasons, such as gripping fear, or a wife who begged him not to leave her alone (which he didn’t have the balls to ignore).  Regardless of what he may or may not have felt or thought during this ordeal, it’s what he did and did not do which caused his death, and all of the other factors are immaterial.  If a man knows that a piano is about to fall on his head but factors unknown cause him not to move, he is still dead when it lands.

The take-away message of this post is this:

Watch Bear Grylls so you know what to do in a crisis.

 

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