Gate on Road Kim's Took Was Never Locked this Winter

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/12/13/national/a204640S46.DTL

A gate on a logging road that a San Francisco man drove down before getting lost and dying of exposure was never locked and was not broken open by vandals as was first thought, authorities said Wednesday.

James Kim, 35, was found dead in a mountain creek Dec. 6, two days after his wife and the couple's two daughters were rescued from the car, which had gotten stuck in the snow.

The federal Bureau of Land Management previously said that the gate to the logging path off Bear Camp Road should have been locked since Nov. 1, but that someone broke the lock and left the gate open. The bureau reversed itself Wednesday.

"We can find no evidence it was ever locked, nor was it vandalized," said Jody Weil, director of public affairs for BLM's Oregon office in Portland. "What had happened is that our engineer and supervisor had asked his folks to close it and assumed it had gotten done, and it had not gotten locked."

Bureau staff members who went to lock the gate could not confirm whether anybody had traveled down that road recently, and they did not want to lock anyone in, Weil said.

that if someone HAD gone down the logging roadbefore it was locked wouldn't have been seen by a passerby? The guy was told to lock the gate! Just damn do your job!!!

1. They went to lock the gate, but were concerned about locking someone in. A very real possibilty in this case, no?

2. Someone else came and locked the gate OPEN with a non-government lock. People mess with these gates all the time, hunters, equestrians,ATVers, etc.

Lemme guess, the widow is gonna sue, when all the locks and lawsuits in the world cannot prevent personal harm from your own ignorance

about locking someone in. That's why I asked about how many people travel the "main road" and a passerby could have seen someonestuck behind the locked gate and called for help. I still blame the employee for disregarding his bosses instructions. Perhapse if he had, the second person who locked it open couldn't have done that.

Someone wanted that gate open and went thru some planning to do so. Its highly possible they would have vandalized it if they had to.

Just speaking from experience, people are always messing with those gates.. Probably happens so much the FS assumed it to be the case

Gates on forest roads are generally placed there to prevent resource damage, not to protect the public. They are usually installed on roads that lead to private land, or for watershed/wildlife mitigation. There are a million roads in the National Forest and BLM lands that are not gated, that the public can get lost and/or stuck on. Keeping an existing gate closed, especially during hunting season, is a whole nother issue.

I can say that the sheer number of roads that run through the forests up there would make it nearly impossible to prevent another tragedy like this from occurring. There are far too many of them to gate off and not every road is deserving of a gate. This is one of those situations where one really needs to be aware of their surroundings, especially in the cold months.

As sad as this story is, I think that in this instance, we had a couple who just didn't understand the potential hazards of wandering off the beaten path in a remote and unfamilar area. Since they were just meandering through the woods on a scenic leisure trip, I suspect that a locked gate would only serve to prevent them from turning on that particular road. It would not prevent them from turning on the ungated road a half-mile away. It's tragic, but things like this happen now and again and, as much as we might like to, we can't protect everyone from everything, all the time. It's just not practical.

...and research your routes! I grew up in rural Northern California and am familiar with the area where the family was lost. There are numerous scenic highways between I-5 and the Oregon Coast that are safe in the winter. The area between Grants Pass and Gold Beach, however, is not.

There are numerous scenic highways between I-5 and the Oregon Coast that are safe in the winter.

I don't care where you grew up or where you live now, I think you're dead wrong. I lived in Oregon for a while myself. I can tell you this: The MAIN road between Portland (which is on I-5) and the Coast wasn't that great in good weather. In really bad winter weather, I'd definately advise people to stay home. IN moderate bad weather I'd tell them to wear chains. PLUS, in that part of Oregon (Eastern, the Wilamette Valley), they don't really have many if any snow removal equipment or sand/salt trucks because the weather is so much more moderate -- snow relatively rare and short-lived -- than the fierce Cascade-Mountain-Range and points west desert plateau where winter is WINTER, by God.

Further, this particular road had one of those permanent metal swinging gates on it, painted yellow, that news reports had originally said had been opened and unlocked by vandals. This was at a fork in the road -- the road the Kims took, the one should've been gated, looked like a wider, better road at the spot of the fork than the right road to the Coast. The only indication that the road they took was the wrong road that wasn't visible to them. Both roads also had arrows painted by a man who lives in the area with arrows pointing "COAST --> " but of course, that was covered with snow.

P.S. When I lived in Oregon I used to say that there were only three things Oregon just didn't do that well, and one of them was build and maintain their roads. I don't think there are "numerous" safe roads between I-5 and the Coast; as I said, the main one from Portland (undoubtedly most traveled) isn't even that good. Little 2-laner with a few 3-lane sections for passing (utterly gorgeous, tho), unless they've changed it drastically in the intervening years.

If they'd taken highways 26, 6, 18, 22, 20, 34, 126, or 42, they would have had a nice safe trip to the beach on their way home to San Fransisco.

They're not their to protect the people from the woods.

Trying to find the "vandals" in this case in order to inact some sort of revenge for Kim strikes me as lynch mob mentality.