During regular summer trips to a family cabin along the Rogue River in Agness, Heather Laird's family would regularly stop atop Bear Camp Road to stretch their legs and soak in the scenery.
Invariably, panoramic views of the Siskiyou Mountains would be interrupted by the sight of tourist in sports cars or RVs with out-of-state plates wondering just what they'd gotten themselves into.
Internet map services and many road atlases they checked had touted the Bear Camp Road route as a scenic route — or at least a backwoods alternative to the highway — between Grants Pass and Gold Beach.
Yet these tourists said they had no idea they were headed on a white-knuckle drive down a one-lane backwoods road with steep cliffs, blind corners, irregular turnouts and regular landslides.
"People would pull up and they'd be so confused," says Laird, of Ashland. "They'd ask, 'Does it get better?' And I'd say, 'Oh, my God, it gets worse.'
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Laird's fears played out tragically this week with the search for the Kim family of San Francisco, who disappeared Nov. 25 as they tried to follow the Bear Camp Road route to Gold Beach.
Laird says guilt has launched her into a one-woman crusade to keep other unsuspecting tourists from ever learning of this route.
Laird has contacted Internet navigation services imploring that they erase any references to Bear Camp Road. She's also reaching out to transportation officials and anyone who could help keep the Kim tragedy from repeating itself.
"I know if this information stays out there, someone else will get lost up there, even in the summer," Laird says.
"Everybody has personal responsibility," she says. "I should have done something this summer."
And already those in the mapping world are listening.
Mapping and driving search site Yahoo Maps has since removed references to Bear Camp Road from their
navigational references, although the route was still recommended for travel between Grants Pass and Gold Beach on Google's site Wednesday evening. Laird is also talking with paper map-makers like AAA to get the road better labeled.
Everyone who watches CNN now knows that Bear Camp Road in the winter is a recipe for tragedy after Wednesday's discovery of the body of James Kim.
Kim died after setting out to find help for his wife and two children who were stranded a week in their car in the snow on a spur road off the regular Bear Camp route. He was gone when a helicopter crew spotted Kati Kim and her two children stranded on a ridge line.
The couple were headed home from Portland and planned to stop at a Gold Beach lodge. They missed their intended route down Highway 42, then discovered the Bear Camp Road route on the map and decided to take it.
Locals know all too well that the Bear Camp route is a series of paved forest roads slicing through the backcountry between Merlin and Gold Beach are treacherous at best.
The route is used primarily by Rogue River rafters shuttling back to Galice from Agness after a trip down the Rogue's famed Wild and Scenic Section.
It's a slow trek of convenience, better in the summer than driving west to Gold Beach and back to the Rogue Valley over Highway 199.
The roads are narrow, slide-prone and unplowed in winter, often leaving them impassable from fall's first snow and well into spring. Three signs on the Galice side of the 40-mile route to Agness warn drivers of road and weather perils.
But road atlases and cyberspace sites almost universally label the route as an "other paved road."
The State Farm Atlas offers it as a "Scenic Route." The 2000 edition of the National Geographic Road Atlas traces it in a solid yellow line — just as it does Highway 238 between Jacksonville and Grants Pass.
So, where do they get their information?
Local governments and existing maps, says Kelly Smith, vice president of corporate marketing at Naztech, a company that provides map information to most portable navigation companies and Internet navigation sites, like Google.
"The way we classify it, in essence, is that it exists," says Smith, in New York. "We won't tell you everything about it, only that it exists."
Naztech classifies the road at its lowest level. It even flags it saying the company's representatives haven't personally driven it, Smith says.
That's the same classification and flagging, Smith says, as most residential streets in America.
Naztech representatives are across the country verifying the navigability of roads like Bear Camp every day, she says.
"I've been thinking about that family around the clock," Smith says. "It re-enforces to me that we are on the right path in upgrading."
Simply closing or gating the roads each winter aren't good options, federal officials say, because they lock out legitimate and safe use of the public lands by locals.
Hunters, Christmas tree cutters and others who venture into the Bear Camp area when weather allows certainly don't want the Kim tragedy to become a reason to deny public access to public lands.
"That's a big swath of public lands up there," says Chris Dent, who manages the Rogue's Wild and Scenic Section for the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. "If we gated that, it would preclude a lot of people from accessing that country."
In the end, perhaps the best way to protect future tourists from repeating the Kims' tragedy and provide Southern Oregonians access to these areas is to improve the maps.
The Oregon Department of Transportation figured that out long ago. It's maps don't tout Bear Camp as a route to take.
Laird says she hopes to replicate that.
"It doesn't matter if you've lived in the woods for 30 years or if you're from L.A., there's a risk out there," Laird says. "This could happen to any of us. Any of us could get lost up there.
"We have to get these maps fixed," she says.
Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail mfreeman@mailtribune.com.
