BS. He did everything he could. For all he knew, the tracks he had seen could've been from the searchers who had allegedly driven that stretch already.
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" ... That Friday morning, John James, the owner of Black Bar Lodge on the Rogue River, got an e-mail from an employee who had read about the missing family. The subject heading read, "Whattaya bet they are up on Bear Camp?''
James said he had redirected "countless'' motorists over the years who had strayed off of Bear Camp onto the logging road that leads to his lodge and loops around. "I just had this feeling that they may be out there somewhere,'' he said.
He left a message with Rubrecht, but she didn't call back. He and his brother went out in their snowmobiles, but it hadn't snowed for a few days and they soon hit bare ground. Before that, however, they could see fresh tire tracks that had been snowed over recently.
Later that day, he ran into Rubrecht and a deputy on Bear Camp Road. He says he told her that someone needed to check the logging roads thoroughly, but "to be honest, they weren't in a listening mode.'' Rubrecht did not return calls for comment.
With no searchers having driven about 30 miles of Bear Camp Road, Dinsmore called for a helicopter from the state Office of Emergency Management. A Blackhawk military helicopter was dispatched from Salem.
"That took a while,'' Dinsmore said. "Sara and I determined we were going to clear the road by air. There are stretches of road where there's heavy tree cover and it's hard to see from the air. Sara indicated they would have a Sno-Cat clear the entire length.''
The helicopter went up late Friday afternoon, came back to Gold Beach at 5:30 p.m. to refuel and searched again until midnight. There was no sign of the Kims. Eventually, Dinsmore believed, Sno-Cat vehicles were able to make it through the entire road.
"We had cleared Bear Camp,'' Dinsmore said. "We cleared it as far as people could travel in wheeled vehicles and then with helicopter flyover into the nighttime hours.'' ..."
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BS. He did everything he could. For all he knew, the tracks he had seen could've been from the searchers who had allegedly driven that stretch already.