Made famous by the Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild and Sean Penn’s 2007 film of the same name starring Emile Hirsch, the real-life story of Chris McCandless is a highly controversial one. For some, it’s an inspiring tale. After all, this was an idealistic young man who rejected the trappings of a safe and seemingly conventional middle-class existence to push the boundaries of life.
With little or no money, he drove, hitch-hiked, jumped trains and paddled by canoe across the West Coast of the North American continent. During his travels he evaded park rangers, state officials and even escaped pursuit by wild animals. Although it ultimately ended in tragedy, he also survived for more than 100 days in the Alaskan wilderness with very few supplies and equipment. With no formal survival training, he hunted and foraged in a territory more than three thousand miles from his home.
Counter to this, it has been argued that he was a fantasist, ill-prepared for the harsh realities of life in the wilderness. His naivety led to his death and, perhaps worse, his actions have subsequently – if unwittingly – led to the deaths of others. The place where McCandless lived out his last days was an abandoned bus, which in time became a place of pilgrimage. In 2010 a 29-year-old hiker, Claire Ackermann, from Switzerland, died trying to cross the Teklanika River close to the bus where Chris died (although it is unclear whether she was trying to reach the bus). In 2019, a newlywed named Veramika Maikamava also met her death trying to ford the river to reach the bus.
Since the publication of Krakauer’s book and latterly the release of a major motion picture, state troopers spent a significant amount of their annual budgets rescuing those who had run into difficulty trying to reach the legendary bus. Eventually, in 2020, the bus was airlifted out by helicopter in a joint effort between Alaska's Department of Natural Resources and the Alaska Army National Guard. The bus now resides in the University of Alaska Museum of the North, partly to prevent more copycat visitors heading ill-prepared into the Alaskan wilderness.
There are many theories as to why Chris chose to live in the wild, the most compelling of which stems from his experiences as a child. On the surface, Chris McCandless had a very conventional upbringing. One of two children, he grew up in a relatively affluent household in suburban America. His mother, Billie, worked as a secretary, while his father, Walt, worked as an engineer, rising through the ranks of various aeronautical companies before taking a job at NASA. Walt and Billie were always keen to keep up appearances, going to church on Sundays and playing an active role in the local community. Chris and his sister Carine had every advantage in life and from the outside theirs was very much the model American life.
Throughout his childhood, Chris and his family took many trips together. They would hike, ski and swim, taking in some of America’s most scenic attractions including the Rocky Mountains, Shenandoah and Mesa Verde national parks. At just 8 years old, carrying his own backpack filled with clothes and equipment, Chris, his father and family friends climbed Old Rag Mountain in the Blue Ridge Mountains. At 3,284ft (1,001m), this peak is higher than Scafell Pike, the tallest mountain in England.
But underneath the façade of a happy, God-fearing family life, Chris’s domestic situation was far from conventional. When Chris was just four years old, his father would regularly leave the family home for days on end. Unbeknownst to Billie and her children, Walt had a second family located just 30 miles away. He split his time between the two households, living as a bigamist with two wives: one with Marcia and their four children and the other with Chris’s family. Adding to the entangled web Walt weaved for himself, Marcia’s fourth child was conceived after his other wife Billie had fallen pregnant with Chris.
But the complications didn’t end there. Chris’s younger sister Carine, along with some of the daughters from Walt’s first marriage, claim there was horrific abuse in both of these households. In a 2014 PBS documentary, Walt was accused of horrific drunken assaults, kicking, punching and pushing both Marcia and Billie. It is claimed that Marcia eventually filed a restraining order, before fleeing the family home, penniless, with her four children. For Chris the abuse he witnessed continued; Carine claims that her mother Billie would invite her and her older brother to witness these attacks. They would watch from the doorway, completely helpless and unable to intervene. When questioned about the abuse, Walt admitted he had a complicated relationship with his son, but he and Billie refute the claims of domestic violence as sensationalism.
Astonishingly, Walt was keen for all his children to have a relationship with one another. This meant that both families would take occasional family holidays and wilderness trips together. During these trips it is claimed the violence would cease. So, it is conceivable that for Chris, life in the outdoors marked a welcome break from the turmoil he experienced whilst at home.
We can’t know for certain if the stories of abuse are true, or if they are, to what extent they impacted the two families. What we can work out from Chris’s writing and his actions is that he was a troubled individual with a very difficult relationship with his father. The two simply did not understand each other. It is well documented that Chris loathed his parents’ money and what they stood for. For two years before his death, he cut all contact with them, accepting no financial help whatsoever. After graduating from Emmory College, he donated his life savings of $24,000 to Oxfam, burnt the remainder of his cash and lived an itinerant lifestyle, working on farms and taking odd jobs. Although it has never been categorically proven, he also reportedly broke into several wilderness cabins when he ran short of money and food.
After travelling for two years, in April 1992, aged just 24, Chris McCandless hitched to Fairbanks, Alaska before accepting a ride a few days later to the trailhead that marked the start of the Stampede Trail. He had a pair of waterproof boots, 4½ kilos of rice, a rifle and ammunition, a few books (including one on local plant life), a camera, a journal, some camping supplies and basic clothing.
After a few days, he reached the Teklanika River. During this early part of the year, much of the region’s water is still bound up with glacial ice and snow. As a consequence, the river would have been low and easy to wade across. On the other side of the river, he discovered an abandoned bus, which he decided would make a perfect shelter. In actual fact the bus wasn’t all that far from civilisation. Originally seeing service as Bus 142 of the Fairbanks City Transit System, it was later used by the Yutan Construction Company to provide site accommodation for a construction crew that worked on road upgrades in the early 1960s. It contained a couple of bunks and a wood-burning stove. When the project was completed, the bus was left behind, as it would have been difficult and costly to extract. It was subsequently used as a shelter by hunters, trappers and backpackers.
Throughout his time living in the bus (the ‘Magic Bus’, as he referred to it), Chris kept a concise diary. Most entries are very brief; usually no more than a couple of words documenting what he ate, such as ‘2 squirrel’, ‘porcupine’, ‘small duck’ etc. On day 43 he writes ‘MOOSE!’, placing an oversized exclamation mark at the end and underlining the word twice.
Alas, by day 48 he states, ‘Maggots already! Smoking appears ineffective. Don’t know looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life’.
Had he skinned and gutted the animal immediately (rather than waiting a day) and cooled the meat down in the river, there would have been far less chance of the meat becoming infested with maggots. He did not have his smoker set up and ready to preserve the animal either, which meant further delay and more time for the meat to spoil.
For a whole week after giving up on the moose his diary entries are blank, and we can only presume he has nothing to eat during these days. The pictures he took of himself at this time show him looking gaunt and emaciated. He spends a few days away from the bus trying to re-cross the river but by this time the great spring melt would have turned the once calm Teklanika into a raging torrent. It would have been impossible to cross back the same way he came in. Tragically, just half a mile from the bus there was a hand-operated cable crossing across the river, but given that he had no proper map, Chris had no way of knowing this.
By this point, around 70 days into his time in the wilderness, Chris had become dangerously malnourished. He writes that he is starting to feel scared and lonely. His diet increasingly consisted of wild potato seeds, a foodstuff which was widely eaten by at least two different Alaskan Inuit tribes and described as perfectly edible in his plant books. But Chris writes that he fears the seeds are poisoning him and in act of desperation he pinned a note on the side of the bus.
“Attention Possible Visitors, S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone, this is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank you, Chris McCandless August ?”
Rather than being related to the domestic potato, wild potato seeds are in fact a legume. It is also known as Hedysarum alpinum or alpine sweet vetch. Although the plant is seen as edible, it is the roots rather than the seeds that both the Inupiat and Dena’ina tribes used as a food source. The seeds contain L-canavanine, a naturally occurring non-proteinogenic (i.e. does not create protein) amino acid. For healthy individuals they pose little risk but for individuals who are in a state of protein starvation, they can be very dangerous, especially when eaten in quantity.
By his 100th day, McCandless writes that he is too weak to leave the bus. This would have been the result of a vicious cycle, since the wild potato seeds grew widely throughout the area close to his bus. As he became weaker, his hunting and foraging grounds must have shrunk to a smaller and smaller radius. Compounding this, wildlife would have learnt to avoid the vicinity near the bus and so the game available would have plummeted. Inevitably, he would have increasingly relied on the wild potato seeds for food, but with a reduced protein diet the seeds would have become more and more dangerous to eat. As he suspected, they were indeed slowly poisoning him.
On day 113 he does not complete an entry. We can presume he died before the day was out. When his body was eventually found by moose hunters, he weighed just 67lb. This is less than 5 stone, or a little over 30kg.
Chris’s lust for life and blind optimism are understandable sources of inspiration for many would-be adventurers. So is his rejection of a lifestyle which would have been safe and financially secure but arguably spiritually bankrupt, in favour of an unconstrained life of freedom.
Some refute this assessment, claiming that his demise, if not actively deliberate, was a cry for help from someone with a very troubled past. The wilderness seems to have been a place that Chris McCandless saw as a refuge, somewhere to escape from a painful childhood, but he was naïve as to just how difficult it was to survive alone. Moreover, several contributing factors as well as some significant errors of judgement undoubtedly hastened his death. For example:
Regardless, Chris’s death was undoubtedly tragic. It serves as a valuable lesson for those seeking a life of adventure. The wilderness can be an infinitely rewarding place – but it should only be taken on when we know what it can throw back at us.
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