The Search for James Kim sadly ended as body found

A searcher (circled) is winched down into a narrow ravine in mountainous region in the US state of Oregon where James Kim (inset) went missing 11 days ago.


Searchers have located the body of missing technology reporter James Kim in a rugged area in the US north-west.

The Oregon State Police said the body of the a 35-year-old father of two was located at about noon on Wednesday (7am today, Sydney time) in the area where an intensive search had been underway.

Kim, his wife Kati and his daughters Penelope, 4 and Sabine, 7 months, became lost in the mountainous, heavily wooded region on November 25, after apparently trying to take a short cut to the coastal town of Gold Beach where they had booked to stay.

When Kim left his family on Saturday to look for help, he was dressed only in tennis shoes, a pair of jeans, another pair of trousers he had pulled over the top and a light jacket.

On Tuesday, searchers found the outer pair of trousers, leading to speculation that they were left as a marker.

Earlier, a satellite was redeployed to scan a rugged area on the north-western US coast to help in the search for Kim who was last seen on Saturday.

The satellite - owned by the remote sensing operator GeoEye - joined some 100 rescue workers and four helicopters in the search for Kim.

A GeoEye spokesman had told Kim's employer, the online technology publisher CNET, that its Ikonos satellite would pass over the area near the Oregon coast where the search was concentrated at about 5.30am today Sydney time.

The satellite boasts one of the world's most powerful cameras. Orbiting at an altitude of 680 kilometres, it is able to zoom in and pick out objects as small as one metre wide.

The spokesman declined to divulge the cost of redeploying the satellite. "We're doing it because it's the right thing to do," he told CNET.

On Monday, searchers in a helicopter hired by Kim's family found Kati and the two girls alive and well on a remote logging road.

The family had kept warm using their car's heater and, when the petrol ran out, they burned the tyres. After exhausting their meagre supplies of food, Kati reportedly breastfed her daughters.

Searchers said there was roughly a 15-centimetre cover of snow on the ground and temperatures at night dipped below freezing.

Photographs of the search area released by the Oregon State Police on Tuesday showed a rugged area shrouded in mist and covered in conifers. One of the photos showed a member of the search party being winched down from a helicopter into a narrow gorge above a fast flowing river.

The search effort has attracted huge interest online because of James Kim's job as a reporter with CNET, a leading US technology news website.

CNET said it had received hundreds of messages of support, but many readers had gone beyond just sending their condolences.

Concerned readers published videos on YouTube to alert users to the missing family, while others created annotated Google maps of the search area.

Another had set up the website www.jamesandkati.com hoping to draw on community support and to relay messages and tip-offs.

At least one blogger put out a call to Google to update its Google Maps satellite images, which would potentially allow anyone on the internet to join in on the search.

That Kati and her daughters were found at all was thanks in a large part to two local mobile phone engineers who managed to track two one-second "pings" sent from the Kims' mobile phone the day after they were last sighted.

A ping is a diagnostic message sent from a computer or mobile phone to check network connections.

Digging through records of mobile phone traffic, the engineers found that one of the Kims' mobile phones had received two text messages about 1:30am on Sunday, November 26.

The engineers were able to trace the ping from the phone when it received the text messages to a specific mobile phone transmitter and also to an area further west where the phone received them.

Armed with that information, the pair created a map showing the areas of the mountainous region they thought would be able to receive mobile phone coverage.

"They hit a flash of coverage," one of the engineers, Eric Fuqua, told the Los Angeles Times. "It delivered the message and told us what sector. That's where it took intuition and guessing."

The engineers' efforts led searchers to focus on Bear Camp Road, near where Kati Kim and her daughters were eventually found.