'While hiking' is perhaps technically true but not the half of it. Dumb shit got lost in the mountains in a car unsuited to the conditions, stuck in the snow. He left to go get help and died for his trouble. His family, who stayed with the car, got rescued.
Which is why your best chance in that situation is always 'stay put', and I suspect it's also why the bay area techies have had a hard on for years to add satellite tracking/comms to phones.
What actually happened was he (and his wife and their two very young children) had stayed put for too long because no one knew that they weren't where they were supposed to be until like 4 days after they got stuck, and then had no idea where to even look for them. By the time a search had even started, they had burnt through all their gas running the car to keep warm and ate all the meager snacks they had with them, and the wife was breastfeeding both kids to sustain them (I think they had also resorted to burning their own tires). But also by that time, when Kim decided he finally needed to look for help, he would have been better off staying put just because of how weak he and the rest had gotten, and that help was finally eventually coming. Basically, it would have been better to attempt to look for help right away, but barring that, he would have been better off staying committed to waiting.
It was a
screwy, messed up situation caused both by the Kim family's naivete and poor planning, and a
notoriously shitty road in the Oregon wilderness where the turn-off to stay on the road was narrower than the winding BLM road the Kim's ended up on, and the sign designating which was which was poorly placed. They weren't even supposed to be on that road in the first place, but missed their interstate exit to get to the Oregon coast, because they wanted to stop at a resort in Gold Beach, and rather than go back, used a paper map to find another road - the wilderness road - to take across, somehow missed all the multiple signs saying that it was closed for late fall/winter, and ignored all indications that it wasn't a typical highway, like it eventually becoming unpaved. And then when they ended up on the BLM road (the gate was left open so not to trap local hunters), they just kept going and going as they were getting snowed on, until they ended up snowed in in the literal middle of nowhere.
Sorry for the off-topic sperging, but I used to have an autistic fixation on this situation.
