Copter pilot who followed a hunch spotted Kati Kim waving for help

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — John Rachor was up in the Cascade Range with his grandkids last weekend getting a Christmas tree when he read in the newspaper that a San Francisco family had disappeared while headed to the coast for a night in a lodge along the Rogue River.

An owner of eight Burger King restaurants and a longtime pilot who regularly flies his helicopter over the rugged Rogue River Canyon, Rachor got a hunch that James and Kati Kim and their two young daughters had made an all-too-common mistake and taken the Bear Camp Road as a shortcut. In winter, the road can be blocked by snow.

A one-lane blacktop logging road through the Siskiyou National Forest, Bear Camp Road is regularly used in summer by rafters on the Rogue River to shuttle their vehicles, and in winter by hunters, cross-country skiers and families hunting Christmas trees.

"On Sunday I went out looking for them," Rachor said from his home in Central Point on Thursday. "I did see suspicious tire tracks Sunday that went down that road. I couldn't ever see where they came back."

He got low on fuel Sunday, returned to Medford and decided to fly again on Monday to the Bear Camp Road area.

"I went out in the same general area," he said. "I just started hovering over all those roads. There must be 50 miles in that road system. There were a lot of tracks on the roads, but they were all bear tracks. I spotted one set of tracks that were human tracks. They're longer and narrower. I hovered over them to verify they were human tracks."

Three helicopters hired by the Kim family were working the area, too, said Joseph Rice, operations manager for Carson Helicopters Services.

After a cellphone company discovered that a text message had pinged off a tower near Glendale and hit one of the Kims' cellphones somewhere to the west, they and Josephine County Search and Rescue had been working the Bear Camp Road area, Rice said.

On Monday, after a pair of searchers on ATVs reached the tracks left Saturday by James Kim when he walked out for help, Rachor said he followed them down the road several miles.

"I spotted her waving the umbrella and running around the road" next to their silver Saab station wagon, Rachor said of Kati Kim.

Someone had stamped out "SOS" and "Out of gas" in the snow.

Rachor said he radioed in her position.

Within minutes, Rice said, the three Carson helicopters were there. One crew dropped food, and a smaller one was able to land and pick them up.