Searchers failed to exploit vital clues in the hunt for the family of James Kim, including several crucial pieces of evidence that surfaced in the final hours of his life, when he was freezing, alone and lost in the woods.

An examination by The Oregonian found a search plagued by confusion, gaps in communication, and failures of leadership in Josephine County, where the Kim family was found.

Lt. Brian Powers, the Oregon State Police commander in the region, said the lack of a central command prompted him to take control Sunday, Dec. 3, the day before Kati Kim and her two daughters were found alive. At the time, the search was sprawling over four counties, each with legal authority to conduct its own operations.

"I knew we had information gaps that weren't being filled, and I just felt like the Oregon State Police could provide something to that effort to make sure that family gets found," Powers said. "If that effort meant knocking down some jurisdictional lines . . . I guess that is what it was."

In the end, the family was found by a volunteer pilot, one of several key breakthroughs achieved by people not connected to the official search. The confirmation that the family was south of Roseburg came from a citizen tipster; and the cell phone evidence narrowing the search was provided by amateur detectives at an Oregon wireless carrier.

Many of the key missteps came in Josephine County. The search-and-rescue coordinator now acknowledges she was overwhelmed by the demands of the search. She failed to call for help from the National Guard, which meant that heat-detecting helicopters stayed on the ground in the crucial two nights James Kim slept in the forest.

Her direct supervisor, an undersheriff in his last week on the job, said he ignored a late-night call from her about the case because he was watching an Oregon State football game on television.

Perhaps the most significant lost opportunity came on Sunday, Dec. 3, when two helicopter pilots discovered tire tracks on the snow-encrusted logging road that led directly to the Kims' marooned car. Randy Jones, the second pilot, landed on the road and directly confirmed the sighting, which he said he relayed to Josephine County dispatchers.

A truck sent to check the road turned back a few hours later, stymied by the deep snow. The searchers filed a report that evening saying they had seen "lots of tire and foot tracks" and that their assignment was "not completed."

Although helicopters were available that day, none was sent, and Powers said he was never told of the sighting.

"That's new information to me," Powers said Friday. "That is critical information that should have gotten to me. I was there all day Sunday and I don't ever remember hearing the information we found foot traffic or we found vehicle traffic, because that would have been a priority. We would have went there at night."

The trip goes awry

The Kims -- James, Kati, Penelope, 4, and Sabine, 7 months -- spent Thanksgiving in Seattle visiting relatives. After brunch with a friend in Portland on Saturday, Nov. 25, they headed south on Interstate 5, bound for the coastal town of Gold Beach where they planned to stay at the luxurious Tu Tu' Tun Lodge. They made a simple mistake on the dark highway, missing the turnoff for U.S. 42, the best route to the Oregon Coast.

As the hour grew late, the Kims turned down Bear Camp Road, a Forest Service road that appears on the map to be a straight shot to the coast. They drove past signs that said the road was impassable in winter, getting out of the car, Kati Kim later told authorities, to move boulders that blocked their path.

The family climbed into the mountains, the elevation turning the icy rain into a wet snow. At times, the snow was falling so hard James Kim had to drive with his car door open to see the road, Kati Kim recounted later. Less than 20 miles off the highway, the road forked.

To the left: Bear Camp Road headed farther up the mountains. To the right: What looked like a more promising route, a wide paved expanse, headed downhill. It was logging road 34-8-36, a wrong turn so notorious it is the only road in this backcountry that the Bureau of Land Management routinely gates in the winter to protect travelers.

The gate was open, BLM officials would later acknowledge, because the bureau had failed to follow normal procedure and close it for the winter. The Kims plunged ahead, snaking their way along a route that sent them deeper and deeper into the forest. Up and down the roads they drove, traveling 21 miles on the logging road as it corkscrewed into the forest.

On Sunday, Nov. 26, at 1:45 a.m., one of the family's cell phones received two text messages. It is not clear from whom.

The radio signals traveled in a straight line from a cellular tower 15 miles away, a tenuous tie to civilization in some of Oregon's roughest terrain. The text messages, which came in two bursts, were handled by Edge Wireless, a cell phone carrier that serves Southern Oregon.

A computer created a record of the call so that the Kims could be charged on their next bill. That record included a crucial piece of information: the location of the tower that had relayed the message. It was the cyber equivalent of a flare in the night and placed the Kims somewhere in a wedge-shaped piece of terrain.

The technology that Kim had devoted his professional life to covering could save him -- if the people searching for him understood how it worked. Fifteen minutes later, the family stopped for the night. The snow fell steadily.

When they awoke Sunday morning, they were trapped.

The Kims were not reported missing until Wednesday, Nov. 29, when their house sitter told San Francisco police they were two days overdue. By the end of the week, their family and Oregon law enforcement officials were frantically searching the western part of the state.

The search begins

With no real clues, county sheriffs and state police in Oregon began driving the logical routes between I-5 and the coast. The Oregon Air National Guard sent a Black Hawk helicopter aloft to search in Curry County.

Worried that the police were not doing enough, Kim family members in California hired Carson Helicopter Services Inc. in Merlin. By noon Friday, Dec. 1, the company had three choppers in the air. Kim's friends and family cast a wide net, scouring the rugged terrain.

In Curry, Jackson and Josephine counties, which straddle the Coast Range, law enforcement officials who knew the terrain best focused on Bear Camp Road. They had good reason. Over the past several years, a number of travelers trying to get to the coast had been stranded there. Several had mistakenly turned down 34-8-36, the logging road on which the Kims' car was stuck.

On Friday afternoon, Sarah Rubrecht, Josephine County's emergency services manager, and Jason Stanton, a BLM deputy, set out for Bear Camp Road from Grants Pass in a four-wheel-drive Ford Expedition.

Rubrecht said the drive made her "extremely car sick" and she had to stop several times along the route because she was afraid she'd vomit. She said she and Stanton decided to "turn off all logic" and simply follow the signs to the coast as an inexperienced traveler might do. When they came to the logging road, Stanton and Rubrecht went straight.

"Where I'm holding the most guilt is that when Jason and I drove up on Friday, we got to that fork in the road," Rubrecht said. "What we didn't take into consideration is that it was snowing hard the night the Kims went through, and they couldn't see that sign to the coast.

That same morning, John James, 45, the owner of Black Bar Lodge on the Rogue River, heard about the Kims on television and "had a hunch" they were up on that very spur road. James said he has redirected countless motorists over the years who had strayed off Bear Camp onto the logging road.

He left a message with Rubrecht but says she didn't call back, an account Rubrecht later confirmed. So James and his brother went up the spur road on their snowmobiles. It hadn't snowed for a few days, and he said they hit bare ground after traveling about one mile. Before that, however, they could see fresh tire tracks that had been snowed over recently.

Later that day, he ran into Rubrecht and Stanton on Bear Camp Road. He says he told them about the tracks and that someone needed to check the logging roads thoroughly.

He says Rubrecht brushed him off. "She was rude in attitude, very curt," James said. "They definitely weren't real receptive to us being up there, it was like, 'Joe Public doesn't belong here.' "

Rubrecht doesn't deny being impatient with James on the road that day. "I was trying not to throw up," she said. Rubrecht does not recall James telling her she needed to check his road. On the contrary, she said she "lowered it on her priority list" because she recalls him saying he had checked it.

She says she did not, however, cross the road off the list of possibilities. "I would have never cleared the road just by some citizen telling me they ran the road," she said. "But it may have gotten mentally lowered on the priority list because we only had a limited number of resources in the first couple of days."

She says she only remembers James tell her generally to "check those spur roads," to which her response was, "Duh? What else am I going to do?"

Rubrecht didn't call out search teams to inspect the logging roads.

That evening, a witness came forward and reported seeing the Kims at a Denny's in Roseburg. The search grid was now about 2,000 square miles.

Another pair of volunteers had an idea that day that could narrow the possibilities even further. They worked at the Medford office of Edge Wireless, a Bend-based company with an extensive presence in rural areas of Southern Oregon.

Eric Fuqua, an engineer, and Noah Pugsley, a co-worker, knew that two major national carriers, Cingular and Verizon, lack cell sites in the area. If the Kims were customers of either company, any calls they made or received in Edge's territory would create a record that would identify which cell tower carried the signal.

Edge President Donnie Castleman, who described Fuqua's and Pugsley's roles, said his company's records are precise. Each tower has three antennas pointed in different directions. Edge's records would say which antenna transmitted the call, narrowing the search area to a wedge on the map.

Fuqua and Pugsley needed one thing to begin their search: the Kims' cell phone numbers.

The wedge

Things were growing desperate inside the car that sheltered the Kim family. It had been a week since their last full meal and they had subsisted on berries and a few jars of baby food. They could get water by melting snow. But there was no heat; the car had run out of gas. The two children were crying from hunger, Kati Kim later told Lindsey Turrentine, James' boss at CNET.

On Saturday, Dec. 2, at 7:45 a.m., James set out on the logging road with plans to return in a few hours.

A few hours later, Sarah Cain, one of James Kim's colleagues at CNET in San Francisco, received a phone call from Fuqua, the Edge engineer. He said he could help. Cain said she relayed the message to Kim's sister, Eva, who had been closely involved in the search for several days. According to Castleman, the family provided Fuqua the cell phone numbers they needed.

Within hours, the Edge team hit paydirt.

Castleman said Fuqua called at 5 p.m. to say he'd made a crucial discovery: the 1:45 a.m. text messages. The signal, he said, was delivered by an antenna on a cell tower near Glendale. The antenna pointed west toward Bear Camp Road.

Knowing that, Fuqua was able to deduce even more about the Kims' whereabouts. Cell signals are hampered by mountains, which meant the signal was likely to have come from a point with a clean line of sight to the tower. That eliminated large sections of the wedge-shaped territory in range of the antenna.

By 6 p.m. that Saturday, Dec. 2, Fuqua was on the phone to the Oregon State Police with a message: He had a break in the case. Soon after, state police Lt. Powers, called Rubrecht to report Fuqua's discovery.

Rubrecht, a 32-year-old former police dispatcher, was named Josephine County's search coordinator in 2001 with no prior experience in the field.

Earlier that day, she had declared Bear Camp Road clear. Rubrecht spent Friday night and much of Saturday pursuing a tip from an employee of her husband's who said he had seen the Kims driving down from the crest of Bear Camp Road safely a week earlier.

On the phone Saturday night, Powers and Rubrecht agreed to meet early Sunday morning to refocus the search.

Powers said he had suspected for two days that the couple were lost somewhere in the area around Bear Camp Road, a view consistent with Fuqua's finding. High-tech means were available that might have exploited the discovery that night, but no one called for its deployment.

The Oregon National Guard had a helicopter equipped with sensitive heat detectors that work best in the hours before dawn. It had spent Saturday searching roads in Curry County, where official there said they were "going to pass the search to Josephine County."

The flight log says "there were no requests."

On Saturday night, 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.

Back on the logging road, Kati Kim and her children were huddled in the car without James, who had hiked at least 10 miles along the logging road before turning down a steep hill into Big Windy Creek canyon.

He was dangerously exposed to the elements.

Ramping up

At 8 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 3, Rubrecht, Powers, Stanton and Anderson met at the Josephine County Sheriff's Office. Rubrecht said she pleaded with her boss to come in, saying: "Brian, I know it's your day off and it's your last week, but I really need you here. This is kind of above my head." The searchers were having trouble understanding Fuqua's map and so they asked him to drive over from Medford.

They waited nearly 45 minutes. When he got there, Fuqua explained what the shadings on the map represented. The area included parts of Josephine, Douglas, Coos and Curry counties. The BLM road shooting off Bear Camp Road, where the family would be found the following day, was one of the few areas where a cell signal could reach and a road existed.

As the authorities deliberated, a local helicopter pilot set out on his own. Like Powers, 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.

His helicopter climbed high over the steep ridges formed where creeks tumble into the Rogue River. He flew in the area north of Bear Camp Road, tracing the spurs. Around noon, he said, he was flying low over the wrong turn the Kim family had taken.

What he saw alarmed him: Down on the road were what appeared to be human footprints in the snow and car tire tracks, slightly obliterated by a recent snowfall.

Rachor said he wanted to keep looking but was low on fuel and reluctantly decided to head for his home base at the Medford airport, about 50 air miles to the southeast. Unsure of whether he had seen tracks from a search-and-rescue vehicle or the Kim family car, he did not immediately report the sighting.

At the airport, Rachor met up with Randy Jones, a volunteer pilot for the Jackson County sheriff, and told him about the footprints and tire tracks. He asked Jones to check it out. Armed with Rachor's map coordinates, he flew right to the site on the spur and landed on the narrow road.

The tracks were bear tracks. The bear, Jones determined, had set its rear paw in the front paw tracks, making them look like biped prints from the air. But he, too, saw tire tracks on road 34-8-36. He radioed back to Josephine County dispatchers what he had seen.

At 1:35 p.m., a four-wheel-drive pickup was dispatched up the road. The two-person volunteer team, Lynn Denby and his wife, Robin, were supposed to drive as far as possible up the road for a visual inspection. Six hours later, the couple reported in a handwritten document what they had seen.

They said the snow was too deep to make it more than several miles. At the bottom of the document, in an area where the author is asked to mark whether the job was done, it read: "Assignment not completed."

It prompted no immediate action.

For the second straight night, the National Guard's heat-sensing helicopter sat on the tarmac in Salem, awaiting orders.

The next morning, Monday, Dec. 4, a snow cat began hacking its way down the logging road. It was about an hour away when Rachor returned to find the Kim family, farther down on the same road where he had spotted tire tracks the day before. Rubrecht said she didn't even know Rachor was in the air.

"I had no clue John Rachor was in the air until after Kati was found," she said. "No clue."

In fact, she said, "I really never felt like I had a handle on the air operation."

"I'm not afraid to tell anybody that it was overwhelming -- beyond anything I'd ever handled before," she said.

Two days later, James Kim's body was found face up in Big Windy Creek. Rescuers believe that in his final hours, he walked through icy, neck-deep waters, soaked to the bone, and suffering from hypothermia in his effort to save his family.