You don’t need to read here that James Kim, CNET senior editor, has been sadly discovered deceased after being lost for 11 days in Oregon. Or wonderfully that his family was found safe and well-fed. It is all over the media, including this good link at Boing Boing to a site for donations directly to the family.
My thoughts are with Kim’s family and friends. And one friend is familiar to many of us. I want to especially send my heartfelt condolences to that friend of James Kim’s, Scott Herriott. They worked together at Tech TV. Scott is remembered in Bigfoot circles as the stringer for CNN who tried to inject some common sense into the initial stories on the Ray Wallace hoax claims. Scott is also known to many as a warm friend, a humorist, and the director of the comic look at the search, entitled Squatching: Journey Toward Squatchdom.
Needless to say, in cryptozoology, one’s thoughts about this whole Kim family situation turns to a concern for people who go out looking for cryptids like Bigfoot in that part of the world and in other places like it. In my younger days, before I broke my back from a rockclimbing fall, getting out in the field was incredible and often going deep into the wilderness (mostly in California or throughout the Midwest/South for me), occurred without a second-thought, with adventure as the wind in my hair. But the dangers out there are very real.
I note in a local article from Oregon, one of the rescuers gives a clue to what might have scared or happened to James Kim:
Randy Jones, a Rogue Valley builder who volunteers to lead the county’s searches by helicopter…said Kim apparently walked along the road for four or five miles. Then, his tracks crossed paths with a big black bear headed downhill across the road. Jones speculated that Kim headed down the steep ravine to avoid the animal, which appears to have followed him….[Jones] described the rugged territory as “virgin wilderness,” with old-growth trees towering more than 200 feet high, heavy brush, fallen logs and boulders, as well as cliffs walling the creek in some areas.
Please be careful out there, those of you who are still able to do the fieldwork I miss and did before some of you were born.
Scott, sorry for your loss.
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