Excellent advice.
I think part of the problem is that the father is young enough and healthy enough to hike quite a ways -- and get himself well out of range of the initial rescuers.
Unfortunately if you are familar with three other similar stories from this area. They were all rescued in part due to the fact that they did leave their car. I think it is a judgement call and it has to be tough to sit with the weather being clear and you are not seeing any signs of rescue or attempt.
One of the issues seems to be recurring is people make the wrong turn on the wrong road and they end up traveling much farther down the wrong path than anyone thinks. So for search and rescue it is nearly impossible to pick the right area to search.
Thank goodness for cellular and Cingular stepping up to use triangulation to focus the search.
It is a shame James left the vehicle but would if he ran into a rescue party first and brought them back to his family...
It comes down to a judgement call. He felt his family was in a bad situation but was fairly stable (considering the weather was good just cold) and they were running out of their few consumables (specifically tires to burn). He just felt he had to try something.
It is a shame he didn't come back at 1:30pm as he had planned maybe he just thought he had to go for it and he did.
We can only hope he will make it out alive. I fear he may have been injured going into the creek area...I do not know why he decided to try to traverse that slope from the road.
Just my two cents...