Mount Hood

The latest reports from Mt. Hood leave almost no hope that the two lost climbers are alive. The bottom line on the two outdoor tragedies in the state this month is: 4 males dead or missing, 3 females alive and well. The three females are the members of the Kim family who stuck with the Saab on Bear Camp Road on December 2, when James Kim went off to try and find help, and died of exposure.

"There is a teaching there in the woman and kid and baby taking the soft path, and living," Rob Buchanan, a contributing editor at Outside magazine said to me at the time.

Maybe that's the teaching in the Mt. Hood disaster too. It looks like after Kelly James dislocated his shoulder summiting Hood, Brian Hall and Nikko Cooke parked him in a snow cave below the summit and went off to find help. The weather turned on them, a full-on storm on treacherous Cooper Spur. The evidence suggests that they fell hundreds of feet and their bodies are buried. The only one to be found is James, curled up dead in the cave, from which he had made a distress call on his cellphone a week ago. It does raise the question: Should Hall and Cooke have waited in the cave with James? Would they have gained anything? Of course I can imagine how they felt: impatient to take action, impatient to get down off the mountain. Especially if they lacked fuel. The same feeling that drove James Kim after a week to leave the Saab that saved his family's life. Propelled by maleness, I would have done the same.

I hope the outdoors experts weigh in on this question...

Till he died on Mt. Hood, Kelly James led a rich, daring life. He did "high-end modernist" landscape design and loved climbing mountains. He proposed to his now-widow at 14,000 feet, on Mt. Rainier. The two men he climbed the challenging north approach to Hood with last week were also veteran adventurers. But the evidence that Hood River County Sheriff Joe Wampler just described at his news conference—two abandoned ice axes, a climbing rope cut with a knife, a glove—suggest that the two died in a fall days ago.

Still the search continues. It's a national spectacle on 24-hour cable. And where there are eyeballs, there's money: Wampler said that he has all the resources he could want from the federal government and state to try and find them. You see the military helicopter behind him.

We've never had anything near this sort of media spectacle about the search for Osama bin Laden, who they say is hiding out in mountains about Hood's height or less on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Supposedly we're looking. But in the war Bush likes to compare this one to, WW2, the 10th Mountain Division drew on the talents of a lot of privileged skiiers. This time around you'd think that our alpinists would rather risk their lives in Afghanistan than in the Cascades. I wonder if anyone's even asked them. Our priorities are out of whack.

Now when everyone is gazing at Mt. Hood, let's not forget the last outdoor tragedy in Oregon. Today's The Oregonian prints a bravura piece of reporting about why local authorities failed to find the Kim family on Bear Camp Road 2 weeks ago. The story documents a series of bonehead maneuvers inside the Josephine County Sheriff's office——and explains why it took a week for anyone to check cell phone records that might have saved James Kim, and how it came to pass that a guy who owns Burger Kings found the lost mother and girls by flying his own helicopter up a logging road many knew to be suspicious but that had gone unchecked.

Among the shocking findings: One top county official was too wrapped up in an Oregon State football game to come in and look for the lost family, a week after they went missing. And for two days as James Kim staggered dying in the forest, and authorities knew his whereabouts, no one thought to deploy helicopters that were available that had heat-seeking equipment that might have located him. (The same technology used in the last couple days on Mt. Hood.)

Here are some excerpts:

Rubrecht, a 32-year-old former police dispatcher, was named Josephine County's search coordinator in 2001 with no prior experience in the field... "I'm not afraid to tell anybody that [this case] was overwhelming -- beyond anything I'd ever handled before," she said.

[Dec. 2] Rubrecht tried to phone her boss, Josephine County Undersheriff Brian Anderson, who was watching the Oregon State-Hawaii game. He said he chose not to take the call, noting that it was his day off.

[Dec. 3] As the authorities deliberated, a local helicopter pilot set out on his own... John Rachor grew ever more certain over the weekend where the Kim family was stranded. At 10:30 a.m., he lifted off in his own four-seat helicopter, convinced he could find them. Rachor, who runs a string of Burger Kings, asked no one where to look. He said he flew straight to Bear Camp Road and logging road 34-8-36.

Three days later, James Kim's body was found.