Fourteen winters ago, a California couple set out on a road trip with an infant child, took a detour off the main highway and found themselves horrifyingly lost to the world.
Jennifer and James Stolpa and their 5-month-old baby survived the wilderness. James Kim, 35, did not, although his wife and two young daughters were rescued after nine days stranded on a snowy road in Oregon.
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Both tales captivated the public imagination: Days without food or water or the sound of another human being. The young mothers, weak and hungry, nursing their children. The young fathers, despairing but determined, walking away into the unknown to find help.
Now living in Milwaukee, James Stolpa, 35, didn’t need to be told why a Bay Area reporter was calling him this week. Yes, he knows about the family from San Francisco that vanished in Oregon.
“The fact is that we’re all ordinary people,” said Stolpa, who has divorced and remarried. “And if these ordinary people are facing this, then something extraordinary can happen to any of us, without warning.”
Some tragedies take but a second and then they’re over, fade to black. But for the Kims, the Stolpas, and the Stehles — the San Jose couple who went hiking and became lost in the Santa Cruz Mountains for five nights after Thanksgiving — the terror unfolded slowly, surreally over days.
The Kim family was returning from a Thanksgiving visit with friends in Seattle. Heading to the coastal town of Gold Beach on Nov. 25 where they had reservations for the night, they missed their exit. They consulted the map and took another route, which they didn’t know wasn’t plowed in the winter. They were stranded, and for days no one knew they were missing.
Kati Kim has asked the media to respect her privacy as she mourns her husband. But in interviews this week, survivors of similar ordeals recalled how at first they felt stuck and inconvenienced; then optimistic that any day now, surely help would come; and finally desperate with the realization that they were fighting for their lives.
Their accounts offer some insight into what the Kims might have faced as they huddled in their station wagon during their last seven days together: The excitement of seeing a bird, a living creature; pressing the juice from the tiniest wildflowers; and having nothing but time to ponder, as James Stolpa said, “to really search your soul, to know who you are.”
Stolpa was 21 when he spent nine days wandering in a blizzard in the high desert of northern Nevada with his wife and infant son in late December 1992.
James and Jennifer Stolpa, who lived in Paso Robles where James was a private in the Army, had been heading to a family funeral in Idaho. Their planned route, Interstate 80, was closed by a snowstorm, and the couple took a detour. Their truck became stranded in the snow, and they were 40 miles from civilization.
For four days, they lived in the truck’s camper-shell, hoping someone would come along. No one did. Then they started walking, towing their baby, Clayton, on a makeshift sled, until Jennifer could walk no longer. They found a cavelike sheltered from the wind for Jennifer and the baby, and James continued on his own.
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“She didn’t really want us to split up. But deep down, I think she knew,” Stolpa said. “If I had stayed there, then we all would have died.”
Surely that’s what James Kim must have felt when seven days passed and rescue did not come, Stolpa said.
“Clayton was completely helpless and needed us to survive,” he said. “That was my inspiration and until I found help, I wasn’t going to lay down and die.”
Maria and Arnaud Stehle of San Jose went missing in Castle Rock State Park the same weekend as the Kims did. They had planned only a brief hike, and carried no food, water, jackets or emergency supplies.
Their first night lost, a Saturday, the Stehles remembered joking about their predicament.
“We thought people would make fun of us,” said Arnaud, 29.
At night they sought shelter in the dense vegetation to keep warm. They hiked every day in search of trails. The terrain alternated between steep cliffs and valleys, with thick brush and fallen trees covering the ground.
Maria Stehle, who plucked wild flowers for their juice, kept fantasizing that a helicopter would fly over them and drop down a ladder, “and I would climb it.”
Her mind was fixated on one thing, she said: “When are they coming for me? That’s all you’re wondering. Where is the helicopter?”
Television recently discovered Americans have a seemingly insatiable appetite for dramas featuring real people in precarious situations. But the human fascination with the narrative story line, with its hopeful beginning and suspenseful ending, has always existed in literature, most famously in “Robinson Crusoe,” a 1710 fictional story of a castaway.
This fall the Discovery Channel launched the miniseries “I Shouldn’t Be Alive,” which, according to its Web site, “explores the very best true stories of survival, focusing on the moral dilemmas, crucial moments, chance events and life-or-death decisions of the survivors.” The Stolpas were featured in November.
It wasn’t an island but a mountain on which Frank Horath, a financial adviser from Aptos, found himself stranded in October 2004.
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For Horath, the media’s intense coverage of the Kims has brought back strong memories.
“I’ve watched it closely,” said Horath, 47. “It’s just a symbol of how fleeting life is, and how ordinary people doing just ordinary things can be taken aback by nature.”
Horath, his brother-in-law, Paul Bargetto, and their two sons were backpacking in the Sierra Nevada one sunny October day in 2004 when a surprise snowstorm stranded them at an elevation of 10,000 feet.
“We didn’t really have adequate equipment,” Horath recalled. “On a scale of 1 to 10, we were at about a 3.”
He remembered feeling denial at first. “I just couldn’t believe this was happening,” said Horath, an experienced wilderness hiker.
Days turned to nights; the storm and rain kept pounding. One night Horath and his brother-in-law had serious talks with their sons, privately.
“This is a bad night and a tough situation, and we may not come out of it,” Horath recalled telling his 16-year-old. “I love you.”
After five days of being stranded in the High Sierra, Frank Horath and his son, Dominic, were rescued on Oct. 21, 2004, along with brother-in-law Paul Bargetto and his son, Michael.
James Stolpa walked nearly 50 miles in sneakers for more than 21/2days before stumbling incoherently and accidentally into the arms of a passing motorist who helped rescue Jennifer Stolpa and Clayton on Jan. 6, 1992. The Stolpas’ tale was made into the movie “Snowbound” in 1994.
After five nights missing, Arnaud and Maria Stehle were found by rescue volunteer Kevin Donohoe on Nov. 30. Search-and-rescue volunteers used ropes to pull the couple up a steep trail.
On Dec. 4, Kati Kim and her daughters, 4-year-old Penelope and 7-month-old Sabine, were found in good condition and rescued by helicopter.
On Dec. 6, James Kim’s body was found in a creek four days after leaving his family to look for help. He had walked 10 miles along a road and through terrain that challenged even skilled search-and-rescue workers, who expressed awe that he had made it that far.
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