[PARAGON]

I stand corrected. This says they built a "bonfire" out of the car tires later after burning the spare.

"He was making decisions, and she was too, that they thought would be the best for their family to survive," Hastings said. "We should all ask ourselves what we would do in that situation. He was trying to save his family."

The chain of tragic events began as the Kims were completing a Pacific Northwest vacation and heading toward home in San Francisco, where James Kim worked at the tech news site Cnet and the couple owned two stores.

Sometime after dark, the family missed the turnoff on Interstate 5 for state Highway 42 in Roseburg, which would have taken them to Coos Bay and a straight shot to Gold Beach.

The Kims consulted a road map and spotted Bear Camp Road out of Grants Pass, which is a scenic route to the coast during the summer but is a dangerous cliffside path often blocked by snow in the winter.

Once on Bear Camp Road, the Kims made a wrong turn onto the logging road and the weather worsened, Hastings said. The family noticed signs indicating that the road is often closed in winter weather and decided to get out of the area.

By that time, it was snowing hard, and the car became stuck when the Kims tried to turn around. It took a long time -- and a lot of gas -- for the Kims to free the station wagon, and by then they were concerned they didn't have enough fuel to make it back down the mountain.

James Kim drove a little farther back up the road until they found a fork, where they stopped. They thought their silver car would be visible there from the air, Hastings said.

For the next several days, Hastings said, the Kims stayed in their car while it snowed and rained, huddling to stay warm and using the heater only sporadically to save gas. On Nov. 29, the weather started to clear, allowing the Kims to build fires outside the car with magazines, wood they dried out, and eventually the spare tire.

A missing-persons report on the Kims had reached Oregon authorities Nov. 30 and the search began the next day, last Friday. But authorities weren't concentrating on the area west of Grants Pass until Saturday, when they looked up records and detected signals from the family's cell phone.

"It's such a big area," Hastings said. "Our job is to pick at that needle in the haystack, and that was being done."

The Kims had built a bonfire using the car tires last Friday, but it had gone out by late afternoon when Kati Kim said she heard a helicopter. Nobody came for them.

James Kim's body was found only a mile as the crow flies from his car, and the family would have actually reached a cabin had they originally continued down the logging road, authorities said.
"I think the irony can speak for itself," Hastings said. "He went the only way he knew."