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The Story of Christopher Johnson McCandless and his adventures - June 1990 to August 1992.

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Back to the Wild - McCandless's Photos and Journals

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Back to the Wild - McCandless's Photos and Journals

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HugeDomains.com - Shop for over 300,000 Premium Domains

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What Really Drove Christopher McCandless Into the Wild - Carine's Memoir

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What Really Drove Christopher McCandless Into the Wild - Carine's Memoir

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Alexander Supertramp

This website is designed to give you a complete overview of Christopher McCandless (Alexander Supertramp) and the book/movie 'Into The Wild' that followed his passing. It is a moving story about a young man chasing after his dream and ultimate Alaskan adventure.

The slideshow you see above are pictures that Chris took as well a picture of his belt that he made with Ronald Franz.

For those of you unaware, Chris was a young man that travelled throughout North America living off the barest of essentials and in most cases, off the land. Unfortunately, he paid the ultimate price for this in the end and was found perished in an abandoned Fairbanks City bus on the Stampede Trail in Alaska. His name became famous after Jon Krakaeur wrote an award winning book about his adventures which eventually became a world famous movie by Sean Penn.

After being exposed to this amazing story, I felt compelled to design this website. This website and my endeavors have connected me with the McCandless family. In August 2010, Billie and Walt McCandless sent me some pictures and information about Chris in his early years. You can see them on his Early Years page.

I have also been in contact with Chris's sister Carine. She has submitted a personal letter to the visitors of this site, as have a few of Chris's other siblings. They can be read . Carine has also written a book titled here. For more information on Carine's work and efforts dedicated to Chris, you can visit her website The Wild Truth which has been launched in November 2014.

We have received a paper from Ron Hamilton, a staff member of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a published author who has won numerous awards for fiction, nonfiction and poetry. You can read his paper and theory on Chris McCandless' death here.

In addition, recently we have received a paper from Wayne Sheldrake who is also an award winning writer. You can read his paper and theory on Chris McCandless death here.

Here are the three books about Chris and his story. The first is Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, second is Back To The Wild by Walt and Billie McCandless and the third is The Wild Truth by Carine McCandless. Click on a book cover to read more information about each story.

Carine has started an annual fund raising event called the If you are a student or a member of the forum and you have a lot to say about the story, we can create a page for you on this website with your picture and your thoughts. We have had some great submissions already. Send us an email if you would like your research paper/story also added to the website! Don't forget to leave a message on the forum or on the new Chris McCandless Memorial Run on Saturday, October 13, 2013. facebook group page.

This website is dedicated to Christopher McCandless and his family. If you have a website, please link to us.Please see the Christopher Johnson McCandless Memorial Fund page if you wish to donate to his fund.

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chris mccandless into the wild movie and book

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Chris McCandless Now I Walk Into The Wild | Alexander Supertramp | Christopher McCandless Into the Wild

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Alexander Supertramp This website is designed to give you a complete overview of Christopher McCandless (Alexander Supertramp) and the book/movie 'Into The Wild' that followed his passing. It is a moving story about a young man chasing after his dream and ultimate Alaskan adventure.

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In 1992, Christopher McCandless set off to test if he could survive alone in the wilds of Alaska. It didn't go as planned.

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On the isolated shore of the Savage River, in the backcountry of interior Alaska, there's a small memorial to a deceased woman named Claire Ackermann. A pile of rocks sits on a metal plaque with an inscription that reads, in part: "To stay put is to exist; to travel is to live."

Three years ago, Ackermann, 29, and her boyfriend, Etienne Gros, 27, tried to cross the Teklanika River, a couple of miles west from the Savage. They tied themselves to a rope that somebody had run from one bank to the other, to aid such attempts. The Teklanika is powerful in summertime, and about halfway across they lost their footing. The rope dipped into the water, and Ackermann and Gros, still tied on, were pulled under by its weight. Gros grabbed a knife, cut himself loose, and swam to shore. He waded back out to try and rescue Ackermann, but it was too late-she had already drowned. He cut her loose and swam with her body 300 yards downstream, where he dragged her to land on the river's far shore. His attempts at CPR were useless.

Ackermann, who was from Switzerland, and Gros, a Frenchman, had been hiking the Stampede Trail, a route made famous by Christopher McCandless, who walked it in April 1992. Many people now know about McCandless and how the 24-year-old idealist bailed out of his middle-class suburban life, donated his $24,000 in savings to charity, and embarked on a two-year hitchhiking odyssey that led him to Alaska and the deserted Fairbanks City Transit bus number 142, which still sits, busted and rusting, 20 miles down the Stampede Trail. For 67 days, he ate mostly squirrel, ptarmigan, and porcupine, then he shaved his beard, packed his bag, and started walking back toward the highway. But a raging Teklanika prevented him from crossing, so he returned to the bus and hunkered down. More than a month later, a moose hunter found McCandless's decomposed body in a sleeping bag inside the bus, where he had starved to death.

This tragic story was told by Jon Krakauer in the January 1993 issue of Outside and later in his bestselling 1997 book, Into the Wild. The book, and a 2007 film directed by Sean Penn, helped elevate the McCandless saga to the status of modern myth. And that, in turn, has given rise to a unique and curious phenomenon in Alaska: McCandless pilgrims, inspired by his story, who are determined to see the bus for themselves. Each year, scores of trekkers journey down the Stampede Trail to visit it. They camp at the bus for days, sometimes weeks, write essays in the various logbooks stowed inside, and ponder the impact that McCandless's antimaterialist ethic, free-spirited travels, and time in the Alaskan wild has had on how they perceive the world.

UNFORTUNATELY, A LOT OF THESE people get into trouble, and almost always because of the Teklanika. In a recent story, writer Eva Holland reported that, in the summer of 2013 alone, a dozen people had been "lost, hurt or stranded by the rising river" on the Stampede Trail and had required rescue. When I was in the area in September, I heard similar numbers from the local authorities who run those operations. I also witnessed, and occasionally became involved in, some of the rescues.

In September, five employees of the Grand, a hotel near the entrance to Denali National Park, had been walking to the bus as a way to pass two days they had off. The cool weather often makes autumn a safer time for the hike, but a string of rainy days had swollen the Teklanika to flood stage. Two hikers, Matthew Grigg and Scott Wilkerson, crossed first, making it to the far shore. Then they watched as the other three slipped into the cold, gray water.

Elizabeth Kubik, the only woman in the group, swam to the far bank and reached for a willow branch, but it was dead and came out of the ground when she grabbed it. She reached for another branch and was able to secure a grip. Wilkerson lifted her and her pack out of the water before giving a hand to another of the swimmers, Jake Zyrek, who was also clutching a branch. When Zyrek made it to land, his lips were purple; he was shaking so violently he could hardly speak.

One last hiker, Rick Johnson, remained in the water, unable to get out. He was the farthest from either bank when he lost his footing and fell into the water, making his swim more arduous. Grigg chased him downstream, trying to keep one eye on his bobbing head, but because the bank rises into bluffs and cliffs, he sometimes couldn't tell where Johnson was. A hunter riding an ATV on the far shore shouted over the rush of the river, directing Grigg to Johnson. Johnson stayed in the water, which lingers at temperatures just above freezing, for 15 minutes. Grigg was finally able to pull him out of the current just before he hit a stretch of Class V rapids.

I walked down the trail the next day, running into two bearded Texans who were heading back to the highway. They told me that five people were stuck on the other side of the river and that they were on their way to notify troopers. When I arrived at the river, I saw the stranded hikers, clad in rain jackets and beanies, napping on the ground. They shouted that they had been there for a day and a half and that help was on the way. I asked if it was worth it, and they shouted in unison, "No!"

I dropped my pack and walked along the river's edge, meandering between gravel bars and yellowing willows as the low sun gilded the water. After a couple of miles, I turned back toward where the trail hits the river. On the bus side, I spotted two moose hunters driving Argos, six-wheeled amphibious vehicles. I ran down the rocky bank, waving my arms and shouting, until they stopped and got out. I yelled that people were stuck on their side of the river, unable to cross back. The group of five hikers eventually found the Argos drivers, crossed the river in the vehicles, and headed back to town that night.

Unaware of the impromptu rescue, two troopers and two firefighters arrived on ATVs the next morning, squinting across the bank, looking for hikers in need of help. When I told them what had happened, they rolled their eyes. They pulled out crackers and meat sticks as they talked about the trail, each giving his suggestion for what to do with the bus: lift it by helicopter, place it on the highway side of the river, or put it in the national park and make it "their problem."

The troopers told me that 75 percent of all of the rescues they perform in the area happen on the Stampede Trail. "Obviously, there's something that draws these people out here," one of the troopers, who asked not to be named, told me. "It's some kind of internal thing within them that makes them go out to that bus. I don't know what it is. I don't understand. What would possess a person to follow in the tracks of someone who died because he was unprepared?"

I WENT TO ALASKA FOR the first time in the summer of 2011, on a grant to report and write radio stories in a small town in southeast Alaska. At summer's end, I went farther north, spending an extra month and a half with my traveling partner, Jonathan, both of us living out of a 1993 Jeep Cherokee we nicknamed Muskeg, which had dented armor, a cracked windshield, and a missing tailgate handle. Jonathan and I drove 3,500 miles along seven of interior Alaska's highways, reporting stories for Alaska Public Radio along the way.

It was Jonathan who first suggested we do a story about the McCandless seekers. The phenomenon is well-known in Alaska-a source of enduring controversy. Every summer, newspapers in Anchorage and Fairbanks publish reports about search-and-rescue episodes on the trail, which invariably prompt online catcalls from Alaskans, who tend to dismiss McCandless as a greenhorn who had no business in the northern wilderness.

Jonathan and I put the idea on our story list, and as we traveled around the state, we read Into the Wild to each other over the clatter of Muskeg's engine. We soon felt the story's pull. I was 20, Jonathan was 22, and McCandless's uninhibited adventures spoke to both of us.

One August afternoon that summer, we drove to Stampede Road, left Muskeg where the pavement turns to dirt, and started walking toward the bus. A few miles in, we arrived at the Savage River, the first major waterway between the trailhead and Bus 142, and searched its shore for a good place to cross. A lanky French hiker, who turned out to be Etienne Gros, came bounding out of the woods. His lethal incident on the Teklanika with Ackermann had happened the year before; this year, he said, he had hoped to lead her sister and mother down the trail to show them where Claire had died. But the Savage's heaving water was too strong for them to cross, so they turned back. Gros escorted the Ackermanns to a motel in town and then returned with a friend to build the memorial.

As we stood next to the gushing gray water, Gros told us about the two months he and Ackermann had spent traveling in Alaska and Canada before their lethal encounter with the Teklanika. They'd met up in Vancouver-the beginning of what was supposed to be a two-year journey around the world. They hadn't planned to hike to the bus originally, but they'd gone to Denali National Park the day before, where they met two French hikers who told them it was possible to hike to the bus. They changed their plans and decided to go. It was the end of summer, and they thought they might see the aurora borealis. Gros told us how beautiful the weather had been and how beautiful they found the trail. There's a photograph of them on the trail, taken not long before the river crossing, in which they're both laughing-the last picture taken of Ackermann before her death. As Gros recalled the incident on the river, he was quick to defend her, emphasizing how experienced she was as a scuba diver and mountaineer.

Jonathan and I said our goodbyes, and a couple of hours later we arrived at the Teklanika. We followed the bank upriver to a spot where the water splits into three braids. We unloaded a pack raft, and Jonathan practiced his paddling in an eddy. Gaining confidence, we piled in and ferried our bags and ourselves across the swift, silt-filled water, pausing on gravel bars along the way. On the other side, looking for a place to set up camp, we noticed two tents and a hammock nestled among black spruce. Three dazed backpackers emerged. One of them, Phil Shoup, an older man from Tennessee, started yelling, "Glory! Hallelujah! They're heaven sent!"

One of the others, Dan Sans Clarasó, a young backpacker from Spain, crawled out of his hammock. It had been Clarasó's idea to hike to the bus. He'd convinced his two traveling friends, Shoup and Lleques Seques, another backpacker from Spain, to come with him. They made it to the bus, crossing the Teklanika when it was knee-deep. But they had returned to find it surging over its banks.

Crossing back seemed potentially fatal, so they'd waited for several days. They watched the river continue to swell with late-summer rains, sleeping much of the day to pass the time. Eventually, they started running out of food. No one knew they were out there. They'd been stuck for days by the time we arrived.

We attempted to ferry them back across the river, but Shoup, a large man, weighed 100 pounds more than the raft's weight limit. When he and Jonathan got in, the raft's edges sagged beneath the waterline, and it started filling up with water. Shoup walked back to his campsite that night in wet clothes, defeated. Jonathan and I ran back to town the next day with Clarasó-Lleques stayed behind with Shoup-to notify the authorities. Soon a helicopter was on its way to rescue them.

Enamored with the spot, many write that they could see why McCandless stayed. One man described his plans to call his parents for the first time in eight years, and another said he would propose to his significant other when he returned from the trail.

I RETURNED TO ALASKA LAST summer on a journalism grant to research the McCandless pilgrims more thoroughly. I lived in a one-room cabin without water or electricity, on an 80-acre homestead a couple of miles north of Stampede Road, bouncing between the neighboring worlds of pilgrims and locals.

The Magic Bus, as McCandless called it in a short note in the back of his field guide to plants, was dragged into the backcountry north of Denali National Park in the 1960s by a D-9 Caterpillar. Fitted with bunks and a barrel stove, Fairbanks 142 and two other buses housed workers who were building a road out to an antimony mine on Stampede Creek. That project was eventually halted, and the other buses were hauled back to town. But one of the axles on Bus 142 had broken, so it was left in the bush.

These days the trail is an overgrown dirt road, punctuated by beaver ponds, creeks, and two glacial rivers, the Savage and the Teklanika. There has been some push from Claire Ackermann's family, along with Chris McCandless's younger sister, Carine, and a few others, to build a footbridge across the Teklanika for safer crossings, but so far those plans haven't gone anywhere, and the river remains a danger to those attempting to ford it.

Stories of trouble are in abundant supply. One hiker I met, from South Korea, told me he had been swept 500 feet downstream while trying to cross. He was alone and lost most of his gear, including the camera he used to document his yearlong journey around the world-inspired by Into the Wild. Another solo hiker, from Australia, capsized trying to paddle across the river in a pack raft. He dislocated his shoulder but managed to swim to the other side, where he used the swift current to push the bone back into its socket, clutching willow branches on the river's bank to steady his body in the frigid water.

Ten miles past the Teklanika, the trail opens into a clearing where the bus sits at the edge of the woods, its old tires sinking into the ground. Some hikers hoot and holler at the sight of it when they arrive. Others pause, open-mouthed, and stare.

Once wild, the site now looks worn with use. Charred fire rings, bullet cartridges, and soda cans are scattered on the surrounding grass. Trash-an empty marshmallow bag here, half-burned toilet paper there-is littered about, though much is consolidated into old oil drums and garbage bags that overflow with wine bottles, ravioli cans, and spent bags of dehydrated backpacking meals.

Most windows on the bus are cracked or missing, covered by a few tarps that rattle in the breeze. Shards of broken glass are sprinkled on the ground. The bus's green-and-white paint job is fading back to school-bus yellow in places where spidering webs of rust haven't oxidized it to brown. Two parallel indentations in the frame mark a spot where a truck seems to have rammed the bus, perhaps in an attempt to knock it over. The "142" is freckled with bullet holes.

The door inside remains stiffly ajar, creaking when budged. Hay covers the floor. At the far end is the bed where McCandless's body was found. It's now covered with a sheet and a brown quilt. Behind folds of tarp, there's a plaque that Billie and Walt McCandless placed for their son in 1993, "commending his soul to the world." A pale blue suitcase they left rests atop a broken set of drawers across from the barrel stove.

Rope, bug spray, newspapers, blankets, Jack London and Leo Tolstoy paperback collections, emergency food, an inhaler, binoculars, a side-view mirror, candles, a handmade poster that reads "Happiness Road Only Real When Shared," and an Altoids tin are scattered in and around the drawers. The tin contains a message, written in Sharpie, addressed to Chris: "All I could think of to give you that would really be a part of me." Graffiti covers almost every square inch of the interior frame with names, dates, and a few quotes: "Live the life you always imagined," "Two roads diverged in the wood, and I chose the path less traveled," "Get busy living or get busy dying."

Most of the writing happens in the logbook, though. When Carine McCandless visited the bus in August 2007, she left a notebook with a quote on the cover: "There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way." She wrote that she hoped her brother's philosophy of simplicity and honesty would one day be more widespread.

The notebook now contains hundreds of entries. One begins, "Dear fellow dreamers." Another calls the bus "the wildest hostel of all." One man wrote that he walked here from Minnesota. A woman wrote that she'd been "a bitch" to her boyfriend right before he fell into the Teklanika on their way to visit the bus. She signed off asking for good luck because it was raining.

Enamored with the spot, many write that they could see why McCandless stayed. One man described his plans to call his parents for the first time in eight years, and another said he would propose to his significant other when he returned from the trail. Many say that McCandless's story is not about a man who died but about someone who truly lived. Some express gratitude to him, "for guiding our hearts to find our own paths," "for giving people hope," and for having the "guts and glory and faith to carry out his dreams."

MANY ALASKANS, OF COURSE, don't feel any reverence for McCandless at all. The debate about his worth is often harsh; locals like to float theories about his death wish, his alleged schizophrenia, and his outright foolishness.

The intensity of the debate was rekindled this past September, when Jon Krakauer wrote a story for The New Yorker 's website that revised his theory about how McCandless died. Krakauer argued that it happened because of a neurotoxin called ODAP, which is found in a plant that McCandless was eating and can cause lathyrism, a condition that leads to paralysis. Because the plant is widely considered edible, Krakauer declared that this finding confirms his long-held belief that McCandless wasn't "as clueless and incompetent as his detractors have made him out to be."

Plenty of commentary ensued, and plenty of it charged with controversy. "Raised by a game guide in AK my family has 'respect' for the land that is different than city kids from 'outside,'" wrote "kvalvik" in a comment on Krakauer's article. "Respect for the land comes to mean it will kill you as fast as a slow rabbit in front of a fast fox."

Few have been as scathingly critical of McCandless's sympathizers as Craig Medred, an Alaskan who has written numerous pieces about him over the years. In the Alaska Dispatch this fall, Medred, responding to Krakauer's article, noted the irony of "self-involved urban Americans, people more detached from nature than any society of humans in history, worshipping the noble, suicidal narcissist, the bum, thief and poacher Chris McCandless."

The pilgrims often encounter similar disdain. I know of beer-toting locals on ATVs who falsely warned three hikers from Phoenix that a "forest fire" was burning between the Teklanika and the bus, urging them to turn back. A pair of hikers I met told me about their experience buying the film's soundtrack at the Anchorage Barnes and Noble, where one man told them that the bus had been removed. When they went to the Backcountry Information Center at Denali National Park to ask questions about the hike, a ranger told them it wasn't her job to tell them where the bus was, and that if they didn't know, they had no business being out there. She said she would end up pulling their bodies out of the river.

Much of the polarization surrounding McCandless stems from a divide in people's beliefs about what justifies risk-taking in the backcountry. In Alaska, it's generally considered acceptable to invite risk while making a living on the land-fishing, hunting, logging, mushing, trapping. It is less acceptable to take chances in search of a more philosophical way of life.

The trooper I had spoken with about the rescue of the Grand Hotel employees complained to me that people heading into the wilderness for purposes of self-discovery can be driven in a way that makes them do stupid things, such as disregarding the weather.

"It's different if you have a trapline and that's how you make your living," he said. "Those guys live out there. They have to go out when it's 40 or 50 below."

Part of what infuriates many about McCandless was the fact that he intentionally made his trip more dangerous than it had to be-bringing only rice for food, leaving behind a topographical map and compass. He sought a wilderness like the one Wallace Stegner described as "the challenge against which our character as a people was formed." Most folks around Healy, the town four miles south of the Stampede Road turnoff, prefer to wander the woods by all-terrain vehicles. It's faster.

The topic of McCandless and the pilgrims came up at a potluck I attended in September. When the name came up, the people in the room, who had so recently been jolly over the halibut and beer, became angry, their voices rising as many shouted and swore over each other.

"Why don't they just read A Walk in the Woods?" said Andrew Pace, a flannel-clad dog musher who lives on Stampede Road and works in Denali National Park.

The guests rattled off names of Alaskans who had homesteaded remote areas of the state. "There are so many success stories," Pace said. "It just makes me mad that one about a failure is so famous."

FOR A STORY ABOUT A young man who wanted to spend more time outside, many of its most obsessive fans spend a great deal of time inside and online. Numerous forums and Facebook pages contain thousands of posts and dozens of full-length essays about McCandless. There is the Christopher McCandless forum, the Stampede Trail information site and various Into the Wild Facebook pages. Followers number in the millions.

Fans have asked each other whether to stay put or travel, whether the scene in the movie in which Emile Hirsch looks at the camera is symbolic or not, whether the Internet would have made McCandless more prepared or more angry. One asked how to get the same glasses Hirsch wore in the movie. Some share pictures of their Bus 142 tattoos, their homemade pendants, and their Lego-and-duct-tape models.

Steve Salmon, a 40-year-old from New Jersey with a graying goatee and stocky gait, was so involved with the forums at one time that he said it was like having a full-time job. We walked to the bus together this August. Salmon had made the Lego-and-duct-tape models, and he'd purchased back issues of The New Yorker and People magazines on eBay with the original articles about McCandless's death. Before we hit the trail and lost service, he texted from the side of Stampede Road, flashing his iPhone at me to show me a new text message.

"That's my friend Carine," he said, smiling.

Another fan, Mike Kramer, 41, has lived in Kentucky, mostly mowing lawns, for the past eight years. The most recent three of those years he spent living in a tent. He calls himself homeless by choice, and says that if he wrote a book, he would call it 365 Days on a Hill Next to Walmart.

A few years ago, Kramer rented the movie Into the Wild never having heard of it. The next day he read the book. The day after that, he bought a ticket to Alaska to go see the bus. Before leaving, he got in touch with Erik Halfacre, asking for advice about the trail. He had no experience in the backcountry, but like many others, he decided it required more determination than expertise.

Halfacre, who lives in Anchorage, created a website devoted to hiking the Stampede Trail. Pilgrims use it to coordinate group hikes to the bus and exchange advice about the trip. When Carine needed a hiker to bring another logbook to the bus, Halfacre put her in touch with Kramer. She called him one night and introduced herself, leaving Kramer stupefied. He describes her as the closest thing to a celebrity he knows.

To date, Kramer has been to the bus three times. His second trip was in March 2011. He spent 16 days on the trail. The temperature reached 30-below, and he suffered frostbite on his thumb. Instead of melting snow for water, he sprinkled Kool-Aid packets onto handfuls of snow and ate them frozen. He spent most of his time collecting wood to keep the fire in the bus's barrel stove going. The troopers checked on him twice. When they asked if he had enough gear, he said he had an extra pair of blue jeans. During one of these visits, a trooper told Kramer he didn't want to die carrying Kramer's dead body out.

This fall, I met Carine McCandless in New York City, where she was visiting from her Virginia home to give a lecture at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx. She has long brown hair and a wide smile. She wore jeans and a red top, and spoke with a full and kind voice.

Carine, 42, estimates that she still receives 30 messages a day from people who've been affected by her brother's story. She answers each e-mail personally. She writes at the desk Chris used in high school and sometimes carries a rock she picked up on her visit to the bus in her jeans pocket. Many high schools have incorporated Into the Wild into their curricula, and she sometimes visits the schools to give talks.

A now iconic photo of Fairbanks 142 serves as the header for her website, a picture of her standing between Jon Krakauer and Sean Penn at the Los Angeles film premiere is on the home page, and a note declaring her determination "to continue to be his voice and carry on his message" is also on the site.

"I think Chris would find it remarkable that people find him so remarkable," she told me, adding that Chris was genuinely mystified as to why more people didn't simply take off like he did.

Since his death, McCandless's family has been actively involved with the community of seekers. In 2011, his parents, Billie and Walt, published Back to the Wild: The Photographs and Writings of Christopher McCandless. The 241-page book contains photos he took during his travels, from Detrital Wash, Arizona, to South Dakota to Bus 142, with captions written by Walt.

Carine created a public Facebook page called "Carine McCandless Into the Wild." She wrote a letter on it, detailing her feeling of responsibility to speak for Chris, since he could no longer speak for himself. She described some of the domestic violence she and Chris experienced as children, writing about their father's "gin-induced rages," in which he told them he was God. She criticized her parents' publication of Back to the Wild, calling it an attempt to "take advantage of vague portrayals of our history with their efforts to create a new one." She described her intention with the page as offering an emphatically true connection to Chris.

And while she still lives in the same town as her parents, she said she sees them so little that one of her daughters wouldn't be able to recognize them if she saw them in the street.

A link to this message was posted on the Facebook page "Back to the Wild-the new book of Christopher McCandless." Joseph Moss, who was the photo editor and designer for the project, commented and accused Carine of airing her family's dirty laundry to the public. He said the story is not just for the McCandless family; after Into the Wild, it became a story "for all of us." Many responded, including Carine. She wrote that her parents "continue to bully him in his death." She asked Moss to come to her house to see unpublished letters from her brother if he didn't believe her accounts of the abuse they and their other siblings experienced.

Alaskans don't feel the same reverence... One noted the irony of "self-involved urban Americans, people more detached from nature than any society of humans in history, worshipping the noble, suicidal narcissist, the bum, thief and poacher Chris McCandless."

Back to the Wild came up when Carine was fielding questions from starry-eyed students after her Riverdale lecture. Afterward, I asked what upset her about the new book.

"They say that they're not lying, but when you're presenting our family as some perfect Christian family, it's not the full picture," she said. "The first sentence on the e-book is something about how we can only imagine why a young man would set off and sever ties with his family and friends. But they knew why he left."

Carine is coming out with a memoir, The Wild Truth, about her brother and family next year, in what she called an attempt to "tell the whole story." In a description of the book, she wrote that she and her half-siblings have come together since Chris's death and found absolution, as she believes Chris found in the wild before he died.

At the end of her Riverdale lecture, she showed a picture of the note that McCandless left when he died, writing in block letters that he had had a happy life and thanked the Lord. She then asked the students how they wanted to feel in their final days.

"It's tragic my brother died young. But because of the trails he had chosen, he died at peace. Isn't that the best that any of us can hope for?"

Many of the students thought so. A few have started fantasizing about taking trips to Alaska to visit the bus. One senior asked me if there was any program that could take you. Another told me she was planning a trip for the first week of March.

DURING MY TIME ON the trail, I met a pair of French cyclists, three middle-aged engineers from Arizona, three Spanish travelers (on their way to work on marijuana farms in Washington), an Italian trekker, and a backpacker from Georgia who travels, train hops included, with a kitten perched on his shoulder. One fan from Minnesota flew out to Alaska, walked the 40 miles round-trip in one day, then drove straight back to the airport.

Jedidiah White, 25, from Missouri, read Into the Wild shortly after breaking up with a longtime girlfriend and deciding not to go to medical school. He wasn't sure where to turn, and the story provided a direction. He began planning a 22-day trip floating the Teklanika from inside Denali National Park to visit the bus. He had little experience outdoors, and he set out for the bus schlepping 70 pounds of gear, including an iron skillet, a knife sharpener, and two rafts. On the second day of his trip, he flipped his boat in some rapids. His gear got wet, his raft tore, and he had to walk the rest of the way to the bus. But the experience "opened the gate," he told me. Before the trip, he wanted to be a doctor and make a lot of money; now he wants to open a winery and spend more time outside. He's been to the bus once more since, and he's planning a six-week trip in the Stampede Corridor next summer.

Darren Storsley, 39, from Vancouver, assigns Into the Wild every year to his high school psychology class. He says it's the best textbook he knows, and he confesses that he spent the better part of the time during his visit to the bus weeping.

A couple of weeks before walking the trail this past summer, Storsley picked up a hitchhiker at a gas station near Talkeetna. The tall and lanky backpacker, Mark McMillan, took up temporary residence in the passenger seat of Storsley's Chevy Blazer as they road-tripped around Alaska. When I met them on the trail, they introduced themselves as "soul brothers." They had driven all the way up to Prudhoe Bay, jumped in the Arctic Ocean, and discovered that McCandless was a shared hero.

"Here's someone who heard the sermon of the world and didn't like it," Storsley said of McCandless as he leaned against his backpack on the trail. "Here's someone who preached for himself instead. Just imagine if we all did that.

"I'm jealous," Storsley went on. "He was braver than I am. I think I live according to my own values, but I'm still in society. I still have a job, I still make money. I go to work ten months out of the year, and I play for the other two. I'm still in the box. I'm not strapped to it, but I'm still in it. And he had the courage to step away from it."

McMillan sat against his backpack, munching M&M's. He's a McCandless look-alike-curly brown hair and a scruffy beard-but about a foot taller. He used to keep the Into the Wild movie open on his laptop, watching ten-minute segments of it before doing homework. He's always loved spending time outside. As a kid, he memorized the names of birds found in Southern California, paid for a membership to the National Wildlife Federation by selling homemade bread out of a wagon, and eventually headed into the woods to backpack, mountain-bike, and climb alone.

During his graduation ceremony at Walla Walla University, in southeastern Washington, he sat with his family at a Thai restaurant and told them that, while he loved them very much, they might not hear from him for the next five years. His plan at the time was to spend the rest of the summer pack-rafting down a 400-mile river in the Brooks Range with an edible-plant book, a fishing pole, and 40 servings of freeze-dried broccoli.

McCandless's story, he explained to me, had helped him see the possibility of a life in which adventure was the norm, not the exception. His recent release from college meant he was free to pursue such a life.

"The bus is where McCandless's journey ended," McMillan said, "and the rest of ours begins." O

Diana Saverin is the founder of the travel and adventure blog These Fifty States. This is her first story for Outside.

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Every year, scores of Into the Wild fans tackle a dangerous river crossing to visit the last home of Alaska's most famous adventure casualty. Why are so many people willing to risk injury, and even death, to pay homage to a controversial ascetic who perished so young?

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In August 1992, moose hunters discovered the body of a young man in an abandoned bus deep in the wilderness near Alaska's Denali National Park.

The body was eventually identified as that of Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old honors graduate from a wealthy Virginia family. Two years previously, McCandless had cut ties with his family, donated his $24,000 in savings to charity and traveled westward.

His journey eventually brought him to Alaska, where he hiked alone into the wilderness and spent more than 100 days there, living off the land through hunting and foraging.

When his body was found weeks after his death, McCandless weighed 67 pounds, and Alaska state coroners listed starvation as his official cause of death.

Writer Jon Krakauer shared McCandless' tragic story in the January 1993 issue of Outside magazine and later in his bestselling book, " Into the Wild," which inspired an award-winning film of the same name.

To some people, McCandless' story is simply a cautionary tale, a reminder of nature's harsh reality and mankind's inability to tame it.

But those most impassioned by his journey tend to fall into one of two camps: those who view him as a heroic figure who dared to live a life free from the restraints of civilization and consumer culture, and those who criticize him for venturing unprepared into the Alaskan wilderness and inspiring countless others to do the same.

Twenty-three years after his death, McCandless still has people talking - debating his cause of death, condemning his choices and discussing how perhaps they, too, can leave everything behind and walk into the wild.

Hiking to the bus where Chris McCandless died. (Photo: Paxson Woelber/flickr)

Pilgrimage to the 'Magic Bus'

The bus where McCandless died was transported into the woods near Denali in the 1960s, and bunks and a stove were installed to house workers building a road. The project was never completed but the bus remains, and when McCandless happened upon it about 20 miles outside Healy, he named it the "Magic Bus" and lived in it for months.

After his death, Krakauer and McCandless' parents visited the bus via helicopter, where his parents installed a plaque to memorialize their son and left an emergency kit with a note encouraging visitors to "call your parents as soon as possible."

Inside the bus, there's also a suitcase filled with notebooks, one of which contains a message from Krakauer himself: "Chris - Your memory will live on in your admirers. - Jon."

Those admirers have transformed the rusting Fairbanks 142 bus into a shrine to McCandless. The notebooks and the walls of the bus itself are filled with quotes and musings scrawled by "McCandless pilgrims," as the residents in nearby Healy call them.

Writing on the interior of the Fairbanks 142. (Photo: Paxson Woelber/flickr)

More than 100 of these pilgrims come annually, according to one local's estimate, and Diana Saverin wrote about the phenomenon in Outside magazine in 2013.

During her own trek to the "Magic Bus," Saverin encountered a group of hikers stranded across the Teklanika River, the very river that prevented McCandless from hiking back to civilization about a month before his death, and the same river where 29-year-old Claire Ackermann drowned in 2010 during her attempt to reach the bus.

Since then, both the Ackermann family and the McCandless family have pushed for the installment of a footbridge to make crossing the river safer, but locals worry that such a move would only encourage more people to venture into wilderness they're not equipped to handle.

There's been talk of relocating the bus to a park where it would be more accessible, or even simply burning it to the ground.

While the latter may seem extreme to an outsider, such a move would be a relief to some Alaskans. One trooper told Saverin that 75 percent of the rescues performed in the area happen on the trail that leads to the bus.

The draw of an old bus where a young man died is baffling to most Alaskans.

"It's some kind of internal thing within them that makes them go out to that bus," a trooper told Saverin. "I don't know what it is. I don't understand. What would possess a person to follow in the tracks of someone who died because he was unprepared?"

Craig Medred, who's written numerous unsympathetic articles about McCandless in Alaska Dispatch News, an online-only news site, has been just as critical of the pilgrims as he has been of McCandless himself, noting the irony of "self-involved urban Americans, people more detached from nature than any society of humans in history, worshipping the noble, suicidal narcissist, the bum, thief and poacher Chris McCandless."

However, the pilgrims continue to come, and many share moving stories and revelations from their journeys on websites devoted to McCandless. But for some, the search for the bus ends only in disillusionment.

When Chris Ingram attempted to visit the site of McCandless' death in 2010, he arrived just days after Claire Ackermann's death and concluded that the bus wasn't worth his life.

"I had an ample amount of time along the trail to contemplate Chris' story, as well as my own life," he wrote. "The wild simply is just that, wild. Unchanging, unforgiving, it knows nor cares not for your own life. It exists on its own unaffected by the dreams or cares of man. It kills the unprepared and unaware."

Visitors to the 'Magic Bus' in Alaska. (Photo: Paxson Woelber/flickr)

The man who made McCandless famous

Critics blame Krakauer for the steady stream of pilgrims to the bus, accusing the award-winning writer of romanticizing the tragic story.

"He's been glorified in death because he was unprepared," writes Dermot Cole, a columnist for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. "You can't come to Alaska and do that."

However, while plenty of people believe McCandless died due to his own lack of preparation and outdoor experience, Krakauer maintains that starvation isn't what did the young man in, and he has now invested years of his life and thousands of dollars into researching numerous theories that have led to debates with his critics, as well as multiple book revisions.

Krakauer says one of the key pieces of evidence that supports his latest theory is a brief diary entry McCandless made in the back of a book about edible plants.

"There's one passage you just can't ignore, which is 'Extremely weak. Fault of potato seeds,'" Krakauer told NPR in May. "He didn't say much in that journal, and nothing that definitive. He had reason to believe that these seeds - and not all these other foods that he had photographed and catalogued - had killed him."

The entry refers to the seeds of the Eskimo potato plant, and Krakauer says the seeds had become a staple of McCandless' diet in his last weeks of life.

Emile Hirsch portraying Chris McCandless in 'Into the Wild.' (Photo: 'Into the Wild')

In 2013, Krakauer decided to test the seeds for a neurotoxin called beta-ODAP after reading a paper about poisonings at Nazi concentration camps. He hired a company to analyze the seed samples and learned that they contained a lethal concentration of beta-ODAP. Krakauer wrote in The New Yorker that this "validates [his] conviction that McCandless wasn't as clueless and incompetent as his detractors have made him out to be."

However, numerous scientists disputed his theory and pointed out that this wasn't the first of Kraukauer's theories to be disproved.

In 1993, in his first article about McCandless, Krakauer wrote that, "In all likelihood McCandless mistakenly ate some seeds from the wild sweet pea and became gravely ill." But in "Into the Wild," which was published in 1996, he changed his mind, saying he suspected McCandless actually died from consuming poisonous seeds of wild potato - not wild sweet pea.

To lend validity to his theory, Krakauer collected samples of the plant growing near the Magic Bus and sent the dried seedpods to Dr. Thomas Clausen at the University of Alaska; however, no toxins were detected.

Then, in 2007, he offered this explanation: "Now I've come to believe after researching from journals of veterinary medicine that what killed him wasn't the seeds themselves, but the fact that they were damp and he stored them in these big Ziploc bags and they had grown moldy. And the mold produces this toxic alkaloid called swainsonine. My theory is essentially the same, but I've refined it somewhat."

So in 2013, when Clausen wrote that he was "very skeptical" of Krakauer's neurotoxin cause of death, Krakauer had a lab run a more sophisticated analysis on the seeds.

He discovered that the seeds did contain a toxin, but it wasn't beta-ODAP - it was L-canavanine. He published the results in a peer-reviewed journal earlier this year.

Clausen, meanwhile, says he's waiting for an independent analysis to confirm the results.

Jonathan Southard, a biochemist at Indiana University of Pennsylvania who assisted Krakauer in the testing, has defended the research, saying that the controversy "has to do with the story, not with the science. And people in Alaska seem to have very strong viewpoints about this."

While Krakauer has scientific evidence on his side, the debate over how McCandless died will likely go on and Krakauer will likely continue to assert that McCandless didn't die simply because he was inexperienced or unprepared.

"What he did was not easy," he said. "He lived for 113 days off the land in a place where there's not a lot of game, and he did really well. If he hadn't been weakened by these seeds, I'm confident he would have survived."

People have speculated that perhaps Krakauer's insistence on this matter has more to do with himself than it does with McCandless.

After all, as Krakauer states in the introduction of "Into the Wild," he's not an impartial biographer. "McCandless' strange tale struck a personal note that made a dispassionate rendering of the tragedy impossible," he writes.

Indeed, throughout the book Krakauer includes his personal thoughts about McCandless and even inserts a long narrative about his own nearly fatal travels.

Anchorage teacher Ivan Hodes thinks it's Krakauer's personal investment in McCandless that makes it difficult for him to accept the young man's fate. "Krakauer needs to know what happened because he looked into the dead face of McCandless and saw his own," he wrote in Alaska Commons.

Hirsch as a healthier-looking McCandless in 'Into the Wild.' (Photo: 'Into the Wild')

A complicated legacy

The question of how McCandless died will continue to be asked, as will the question of why he chose to leave civilization behind and walk into the wild. Opinions on the latter vary depending on whose account you read; not only has Krakauer written about it at length, but so have McCandless' parents, his sister and numerous others.

But the question at the heart of the McCandless discussion is whether he's a man worthy of admiration or condemnation.

Strong opinions - for and against - are the reason Krakauer's initial article on McCandless generated more mail than any other story in the magazine's history.

To some people, McCandless is simply a selfish and woefully naive young man who wandered unprepared into the wilds of Alaska and got exactly what he deserved.

To others, he's an inspiration, a symbol of freedom and the embodiment of true adventure.

Even while he was alive, something about McCandless could move people to dramatic change, as evidenced by his effect on then 81-year-old Ronald Franz, who met McCandless in 1992 before the young man left for Alaska. The two grew close, and upon receiving a letter from McCandless urging him to change his lifestyle, Franz did just that, putting his belongings into storage and setting out into the desert.

But in his death - and his memorialization in literature and film - McCandless has had far greater influence.

Reading "Into the Wild," it's easy to understand why it has captured the imaginations of so many and inspired journeys into the wilderness. While certainly a story of tragedy, it's also a compelling and thoughtful look at why we often turn to nature for answers to life's questions.

"The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure," McCandless wrote in his letter to Franz. Upon reading that within the pages of Krakauer's book, it's hardly surprising that many readers have, in turn, sought adventures of their own.

However, while McCandless will always be a hero to some, he will also always have his detractors. After all, he's only human.

Perhaps Hodes put it best when he wrote, "Chris McCandless was deeply kind and supremely selfish; tremendously brave and jaw-droppingly foolish; impressively competent and staggeringly inept; that is to say, he was hewn from the same crooked timber as the rest of us."

Why are we still talking about Chris McCandless?

It's been 23 years, but the young man who ventured into the wilds of Alaska and ultimately died there in 1992 is still making headlines.

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Why are we still talking about Chris McCandless?

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In August 1992, moose hunters discovered the body of a young man in an abandoned bus deep in the wilderness near Alaska's Denali National Park. The body was eventually identified as that of Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old honors graduate from a wealthy Virginia family.

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McCandless's Sister Talks about their Parents

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McCandless's Sister Talks about their Parents

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The sister of Chris McCandless, the hiker whose two-year odyssey across America and into the Alaskan wilderness was immortalized in the bestselling book "Into the Wild," says his expedition was not just about his love of nature and his adventurous spirit, but also reflected his intent to sever ties with his parents after what she calls traumatic childhood.

McCandless was 22 years old and newly graduated from college in May 1990 when he set out across the American West in a trip that would ultimately take him to the wilds of Alaska.

His journey was immortalized in the book, which is still on school curriculums across the country, and later turned into an award-winning movie. The book detailed how after graduation McCandless suddenly disappeared, not telling his family where he was going, giving his savings to a charity, using the name "Alexander Supertramp," and then hitchhiking across deserts and the Great Plains, riding the rails and living in a trailer park on the rugged California coast before finally making his way to Alaska.

Just over four months after he reached Alaska, McCandless' body was found by hunters in an abandoned bus he had found 30 miles away from the nearest town. McCandless had died of starvation. His corpse weighed just 67 pounds.

According to his journal, for 114 days, Chris lived in what he called his "magic bus." By the end, he had written that "death looms" and he was "too weak to walk out." He wrote that he had "literally become trapped in the wild."

McCandless has been criticized for being selfish and unprepared for his trip. He was there without a map and proper survival gear, and he had gone to great lengths to make it impossible for anyone to find him. But today, every spring, hikers from around the world still make the two-day trek to the bus, which has become a shrine to the young man many idolize as a symbol of adventure and a turning away from material things.

McCandless' sister, Carine McCandless, and his half-sisters, Shelly and Shawna, say there is something else that many people don't know. They are sharing what they say is a vital part of their brother's story, one that better explains why he had gone to such great lengths to vanish from their view on his epic excursion.

"Frankly I was asked every time I met with a group of people... why Chris left the way he did and why he felt the need to push himself to such extremes," Carine told ABC News. "I really watered down those answers for a long time ... and I really felt and learned that I was doing a disservice to Chris and all those people 'cause the greatest inspiration comes from truth."

In a new memoir, "The Wild Truth," Carine writes that she believes her brother's sudden disappearance and journey reflected his determination to separate himself from their parents and a traumatic childhood that she says they both shared.

"He wanted to really separate himself from a situation he felt was very toxic," Carine told ABC News.

The whole truth, she said, doesn't begin at the bus in Alaska, but rather at their childhood home 3,000 miles away in El Segundo, California.

"He was Chris. He was my protector," she said. "He was always strong. He succeeded at everything he tried."

Carine said she has fond memories of family vacations and time spent outdoors with her family. Her father Walt McCandless is a renowned rocket scientist who had worked for NASA, and her mother Billie McCandless built a consulting business with him.

But family life for Chris was much more complicated than it appeared to be. When Walt McCandless moved into a home with Billie and started having children with her, he was still married to his first wife Marcia and continuing to have children with her. In fact Walt was dividing his time between the two homes: one with Billie, Chris, and Carine and another with Marcia and their six children, including Chris' older half-sisters Shelly and Shawna.

"Both women were pregnant at the same time. I think a lot of people don't realize that," Shawna McCandless said. "This was a man that was in and out of our house. He would spend four or five days ... with us, and then be gone for a while. And then he'd come back."

Walt and Marcia finally divorced when Chris was 4 years old. In her new book, Carine says Chris did not learn until he was in high school that his father had still been married to Marcia when he was born, and that this realization upset him greatly.

After the divorce, Carine and Chris grew up knowing their half-siblings well, as Walt would take his children from his two marriages on vacations together and they would visit Walt and Billie's home, sometimes for extended periods.

But in her new book Carine also writes about what she says was a darker side of this already complex family.

She says -- and her half-sisters Shelly and Shawna agree -- that their father was controlling and domineering, with a hair-trigger temper that expressed itself in angry, verbal outbursts, threats, invective, and even physical attacks on his wives Billie and Marcia.

"There was a lot of choking and shoving," said Shelly McCandless, who lived in Walt and Billie's home with her half-siblings Chris and Carine during her senior year of high school.

"We would hear raised voices, and it would get louder and louder, and Chris would usually come and grab me and get me outside of the house," Carine said. "We would hear my mom say, 'Kids, kids, Come look what your father is doing to me,' and then he would scream right after, 'kids, get in here now, look what your mother is making me do.'"

"Dad would throw Mom down on the bed," Carine continued. "And he would be choking her, and she -- in between her breath -- she would be screaming out for help, and when he released her and walked out, she would run over to us and put her arms around us, and she would apologize to us."

Carine's half-sisters Shelly and Shawna said they also witnessed their father's volcanic temper in their home with their mother, Marcia.

ABC News obtained a copy of a restraining order Marcia obtained in 1972 against Walt -- shortly before their divorce -- in which she alleged that he had recently "struck" her in the arm and face, that he "has struck and threatened [her] on numerous occasions," and that she "feared for her safety."

In her book and in her interview with ABC News, Carine McCandless also describes an incident in which her father's aggression was directed at Chris, who was then in high school.

"Dad just hauled off and punched him right on the spin, and Chris just turned and looked to him and [had a] puff of disgust across his lips," she said. "And I saw this fear come across my father's face, and Chris just turned around and walked away."

Walt and Billie McCandless declined to speak to ABC News for this report. In a statement to ABC addressing Carine McCandless' new book, Walt and Billie McCandless said, "[This] fictionalized writing has absolutely nothing to do with our beloved son, Chris, his journey or his character. ... This whole unfortunate event in Chris' life 22 years ago is about Chris and his dreams." They call her allegations "hyped up" and "spiteful."

In her book, and in a new documentary that will air on PBS this month called "Return to the Wild, The Chris McCandless Story," Carine quotes from letters that Chris wrote to her before he left, letters she had kept secret for decades.

The letters contain numerous complaints about his parents and their childhood.

In one of the letters, Chris wrote to Carine that after his college graduation, "once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I'm going to completely knock them [Walt and Billie] out of my life. I'm going to divorce them as my parents. ... I'll be through with them once and for all forever."

"I'm not releasing the letters to hurt my parents," Carine McCandless told ABC News. "I'm releasing parts of his letters for people to get a better understanding of Chris because I think there's a lot of valuable lessons there, and I think it can help a lot of people."

Although Walt and Billie tried to locate Chris after he disappeared on his journey, even hiring an investigator, he made himself impossible to find, using a different name, going to great lengths to leave no traceable tracks.

"Walt and Billie deserve sympathy for losing their son, absolutely," Carine McCandless said. "I don't blame Walt and Billie for his death, but I do hold them accountable for his disappearance ... the fact that we didn't know where he was and he felt he had to be Alexander Supertramp."

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'Into the Wild' Hiker's Sister Says He Was Determined to Cut Ties with Parents

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The sister of Chris McCandless, the hiker whose two-year odyssey across America and into the Alaskan wilderness was immortalized in the bestselling book "Into the Wild," says his expedition was not just about his love of nature and his adventurous spirit, but also reflected his intent to sever ties...

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Fifteen years have passed: 15 howling Alaska winters and 15 brief frenzied summers, and the ancient bus on the Stampede Trail still rusts in the wilderness, almost exactly as Chris McCandless left it. Twenty-two miles from the nearest road, shaded out by alder and black spruce on a moraine rise above a creek, the green and white WWII-vintage International Harvester looks surreally out of place, like an artifact from a vanished civilization. The bus doesn't at first seem a likely time capsule of American mythology, a shrine to which people from around the world make pilgrimages and leave tributes in memory of a young man whom they see as a fallen hero. It doesn't look to be the sort of place that would inspire a best-selling book, much less a major motion picture. But that's exactly what it is.

Fireweed and wild potato grow up in the wheel wells. On the side of the bus FAIRBANKS 142 is still legible in paint that has been bleached and scoured by the seasons. A few bullet holes have starred the windows; whether they were fired out of anger or boredom is unclear. Other than that, the people who have made the trek out here, out of respect or superstition, have left the site largely untouched. The vertebrae of the young moose McCandless shot lie scattered. The bones, and a smattering of feathers, add to the spooky aura of a charnel ground. Inside, near an old oil-barrel stove, McCandless's jeans are neatly folded on a shelf, knees patched with scraps of an old army blanket, seat patched with duct tape. And the bed is still there too, springs and stuffing bursting from the stained mattress, as if a wild animal's been at it. The same bed where they found his body.

It was a haunting tale, capturing the imagination of the country. September 1992, deep in the bush of the Alaskan interior northeast of Mount McKinley, in an abandoned bus on a disused mining trail, the decomposed body of a man was found by a moose hunter. The remains weighed only 67 pounds, and he had apparently died of starvation. He carried no identification, but a few rolls of undeveloped film and a cryptic journal chronicled a horrifying descent into sickness and slow death after 112 days alone in the wilderness. When the man's identity was established, the puzzle only deepened. His name was Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old honors graduate, star athlete, and beloved brother and son from a wealthy but dysfunctional East Coast family. With a head full of Jack London and Thoreau, McCandless rechristened himself "Alexander Supertramp," cut all ties with his family, gave his trust fund to charity, and embarked on a two-year odyssey that brought him to Alaska, that mystic repository of American notions of wilderness, a blank spot on the map where he could test the limits of his wits and endurance. Setting off with little more than a .22 caliber rifle and a 10-pound bag of rice, McCandless hoped to find his true self by renouncing society and living off the land. But, as Craig Medred would note in the 'Anchorage Daily News', "the Alaska wilderness is a good place to test yourself. The Alaska wilderness is a bad place to find yourself." No one ever saw McCandless alive again. Fifteen years later his story continues to resonate as a quintessentially American tale, and its hero has assumed near mythic status, blurring the lines between living memory and the creation of a legend.

When writer Jon Krakauer first heard McCandless's story, he later told a reporter, "the hair on my neck rose." Krakauer's profound empathy for his subject and obsessive research yielded 'Into the Wild', a heartbreaking portrait that has sold more than 2 million copies and become the authoritative version of the McCandless story, around which all discussions are framed. In Krakauer's telling, McCandless represents the human urge to push the limits of experience, to live a life untouched by the trappings of culture and civilization. Now that portrait has been taken up by the ultimate mythologizer: Hollywood. The film, to be released in September, was written and directed by Sean Penn and filmed on location in the many places McCandless traveled.

Woven through with the timeless themes of self-invention, risk, and our complex relationship to the natural world, the enigma of Chris McCandless is once again being debated, more vociferously than ever. Was his death a Shakespearean tragedy or a pitch-black comedy of errors? What impact has the tale and its renown had on our perception of Alaska? And perhaps most tantalizingly: Did Krakauer, and now Penn, get key parts of the story wrong?

From almost the moment he was found, the meaning of Chris McCandless's life and lonely death has been fiercely argued. The debate falls into two camps: Krakauer's visionary seeker, the tragic hero who dared to live the unmediated life he had dreamed of and died trying; or, as many Alaskans see it, the unprepared fool, a greenhorn who had fundamentally misjudged the wilderness he'd wanted so desperately to commune with. If the cult that has grown up around McCandless is any indication, we want the romantic portrait to be true: that he made a series of small mistakes that compounded in disaster. But the truth doesn't always conform to Hollywood's ideals.The eerie quiet at the bus, broken only by the drone of mosquitoes and the rustling of alder leaves, would be more unsettling were it not for the presence of Brent Keith, a local hunting guide who has driven me out to the bus on his six-wheeled Polaris Ranger ATV. I feel relieved to have the burly 38-year-old Alaskan here, wearing a "Team Glock" hat and carrying a 10mm on his hip to prove it, plus a satellite phone and a six-pack of Moosehead behind the seat. On the way to the bus, a two-day hike from the nearest road, we spotted enormous bear tracks, and Keith had told me about dropping a charging grizzly from 15 feet away.

To reach the spot where McCandless died we forded two rivers, the Savage and the Teklanika, the latter milky with glacial till and running so high and swift it had come up to our seats when we plowed through, nearly drowning the air intake on the Ranger. As he steered into the rushing water, Keith had shouted to me over the straining engine, "You know what the state motto of Alaska is? 'Hold my beer and watch this!'" An even fiercer torrent had prevented McCandless from hiking out when he tried to leave the bush in July of 1992.

On the way in we'd come across Kevin and Rob Mark, brothers from New Jersey, who were hiking two days back to the trailhead after staying a night at the bus. They had read Krakauer's book and wanted to see if they could make it out on foot, to gain some sense of what McCandless had endured. "It was a great adventure getting out there, but crossing the river was terrifying," Rob told me. They were both knocked down and nearly carried off in the swift icy water of the Teklanika.

A year younger than McCandless would have been today had he lived, Keith has a distinctly Alaskan viewpoint on his death, unsentimental and unswayed by romanticism. He points to a clear pool in a stream not 50 feet from the bus, in which dozens of foot-long grayling swim against the current. "You could practically shovel those out with a spruce branch," he tells me. "And I just don't get why he didn't stay down by the Teklanika until the water got low enough to cross. Or walk upstream to where it braids out in shallow channels. Or start a signal fire on a gravel bar." He peers inside the bus and shakes his head at what he sees as a greenhorn in over his head who had retreated to the only sign of civilization for miles when he realized he couldn't make it. "Tough enough to live out here without trying harder," he says. "We're hard up for heroes if that's what it takes - some guy who starved to death in a bus."

The majority of Alaskans share some version of the opinion that McCandless was deeply out of his element. Medred, the outdoors columnist for the 'Anchorage Daily News,' believes that he was suffering from schizophrenia and compares him to Timothy Treadwell, the unstable filmmaker and bear enthusiast who (along with his girlfriend) was killed and eaten by a grizzly in Katmai National Park in 2003. "McCandless didn't need the wilderness," he says. "He needed help."

Alaskans fault Krakauer for romanticizing McCandless, thereby encouraging others to model themselves after his life. Before the film has even been released, it has become common to blame Hollywood for further glamorizing a senseless tragedy. As Dermot Cole, a columnist for the 'Fairbanks Daily News-Miner', puts it, "To sell the story, they've made it into a fable. He's been glorified in death because he was unprepared. You can't come to Alaska and do that."

Butch Killian, one of the moose hunters who discovered McCandless's body in September 1992, considered it just another day in the bush and doesn't understand why such a big deal has been made out of the story. He told me he had never read the book and had no idea that it had been a bestseller, that thousands of people had felt a deep identification with Krakauer's portrait of McCandless. "I don't know what his problem was, but it wasn't surviving. If he's a hero, he's a dead hero." Killian doesn't think that a visit to the site will provide many answers. "So many people have asked me to take them out there. What in the world would you want to go back there for? It's nothing but an old bus."

Old bus or no, Fairbanks 142 has become something of a reliquary, a shrine to which many have come seeking understanding: of McCandless, of the wilderness, of themselves. A memorial plaque to McCandless is screwed to the inside of the bus, bearing a message from his family that ends with the phrase "We commend his soul to the world." Inside a beat-up suitcase on a table are a half-dozen tattered notebooks. The first entries, from July 1993, in red pen on paper yellowing with age, are personal notes from his parents. They visited the site with Jon Krakauer by helicopter. Krakauer also left a note: "Chris - Your memory will live on in your admirers. - Jon"

And those admirers came: The dog-eared notebooks are filled with hundreds of entries from pilgrims who traveled the arduous 22 miles out to try to feel some connection with the McCandless spirit. They came by snowmobile, dogsled, mountain bike, and mostly by foot, usually taking two days to hike the boggy, mosquito-plagued trail and ford the freezing rivers. They came from across the U.S. and from as far as Bulgaria, Finland, and the Czech Republic. They came because there was something about the story, and about Alaska, that drew them there.

Together the entries form a chorus of voices, some questioning, some praising, all trying to wring some meaning out of his story, and by extension, their own lives: I am 20 years old and feel a kinship with Chris.... This is God's country and a beautiful place to leave this world.... We shouldn't Romanticize or canonize him.... What went on here, at this bus, transcends the ordinary and mundane.... Chris was completely awake to life.... for the first time in many years I am crying.... Chris may have fucked up, but he fucked up brilliantly.... he found the serenity of the spirit that most die without.... pray for Chris's critics.... There is something about Alaska that changes you.... You go your way - I'll go your way too. That last line, from a Leonard Cohen poem, was written by Sean Penn, when he visited the bus in August 2006. Penn had been trying to bring Krakauer's book to the screen ever since first picking it up years ago. "The cover intrigued me so I bought it, went home, and read it straight through. Twice," says Penn. "I started trying to get the rights from then on." Ultimately he wrote the screenplay, directed, and helped produce the film himself, shepherding the movie through every step.

In an age of digital shortcuts and studio interference, Penn refused to compromise, insisting on filming in the places McCandless had been. 'Into the Wild' takes place in Alaska, and it would be filmed in Alaska. It followed McCandless to locations as far-flung as the Salton Sea in the California desert and Carthage, South Dakota, where the film's production crew doubled the size of the town. "It just felt like the only way to make the movie. That's all," says Penn. "It always felt worth the sacrifice."

Alaskans often shake their heads at misrepresentations of their state in the media, and there is a fair bit of anticipatory skepticism about the movie. Dave Talerico, the mayor of Denali Borough (population 2,000, and roughly the size of Maryland), grew up in Roslyn, Washington, the stand-in for the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska, in the show ' Northern Exposure.' So he wasn't surprised when Penn decided to shoot the Alaska scenes 50 miles south of where McCandless actually died, in the tiny town of Cantwell, where the landscape conformed more readily to the Hollywood vision of the Last Frontier.

"What I don't understand with all these books and movies," Talerico tells me, "is why they don't tell the stories of the people who survive. The ones who have forged a life here?"

Cantwell lies on the Alaska Railroad line just south of Denali National Park. Filming at the bus was too remote for the technical demands of a movie shoot; the Alaska Range lies low and distant on the horizon. Cantwell, by contrast, is right next to the buttress of mountains that form Denali's foothills. It's a picture-perfect vision of the Alaskan wilderness - a stark contrast from the grim, swampy, mosquito-swarmed site of McCandless's death.

It was probably an inevitable irony that, despite its best intentions, a production from the lower 48 would have some of the same difficulties in the Alaskan interior as its subject. Wayne Westerberg, a friend, the recipient of the postcard in which McCandless announced that the boy was walking "into the wild," was hired as a consultant and then as a union truck driver for the production. "There were lots of logistical problems shooting on location," says Westerberg, a former grain-elevator operator who is played by Vince Vaughn in the film. "We had to drive through four feet of water just to get between base camp and the shoot. We swamped a lot of vehicles and brought a lot back to the rental company in pieces." Then there were issues with the "wildlife": the trained grizzly stuck on the wrong side of a river who nearly needed an airlift, reindeer not moving on cue, trained wolves that didn't act wolfy enough.

Whatever the challenges, the resulting film is visually stunning, the landscapes of the American West and far north shot in epic scope and intimate detail, the soundtrack haunted by Eddie Vedder's throaty growl. The part of McCandless fell to 22-year-old Emile Hirsch. To match McCandless's sinewy, athletic build Hirsch worked out obsessively, losing 26 pounds before filming even began. During the course of production, as he paced McCandless's descent into starvation, he shed another 15, in a chilling transformation. "By the end I was down to 115 pounds," says Hirsch. "I had no energy at all. It changes everything about you: the way you think, the way you treat others, the way you are alone."

Alongside a busload of famous actors (Vaughn, William Hurt, Hal Holbrook, Catherine Keener), the real characters and haunts of the American underclass have cameos, giving the film at times a documentary feel. At every encounter in his nomadic wanderings - from soup kitchens and train yards to the vast landscapes of the Grand Canyon and the Alaska Range - we see McCandless flitting through people's lives, leaving them changed before vanishing. But whereas Krakauer showed both sides of McCandless - the hapless tenderfoot and the enlightened eternal seeker - Penn presents only the latter version. His McCandless is almost Christlike. It is a deeply mythic take on a character who is largely a cipher. Clearly, in Sean Penn's eyes, 'Into the Wild' is a story about something profound and universal in the human spirit, a longing for freedom and a pure connection to the natural world that's been lost.

"I'm not trying to romanticize him," insists Penn, who has little patience for McCandless's critics. "There are few people in Alaska who have done anything comparable to what Chris did. We're not talking about a week with another buddy and ATVs, hunting. This was 113 days, 79 of them by choice. And he did pretty damn well. Did he make mistakes? Sure. A lot of people do. But however many miles he needed to walk to become a man was up to him. So I think he did very well by any standard, including Alaskan."For both Penn and Krakauer, the McCandless story became an obsession. No one, save perhaps McCandless's own grieving family, tried harder to understand his journey and, especially, his strange death, than Krakauer, who saw something of himself in McCandless's youthful passion for risk and remote places. 'Into the Wild' is laid out like a meticulous legal brief in defense of a human soul. There is a mountain of evidence with which Krakauer makes his arguments: interviews, journals, photographs, historical comparisons.

The book's Sherlock Holmes moment comes near the end. Seeking to explain why McCandless grew sick and died so suddenly, Krakauer hypothesized that he'd unintentionally poisoned himself. To supplement his fortunes shooting squirrels, porcupines, and woodpeckers, McCandless had been eating the seeds of the wild potato, a native plant whose roots have provided food for the Athabascan people for centuries. Weakened and near death, McCandless had written "Fault of pot. seed" in his journal. The plant was not thought to be toxic, but, acting on a hunch, Krakauer sent some seeds found near the bus to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks for analysis. Initial results indicated the presence of a toxic alkaloid, one that Krakauer made much of, claiming that perhaps "McCandless wasn't quite as reckless or incompetent as he was made out to be." It was a small but crucial mistake. As Krakauer presented it, McCandless had been poisoned by a toxin that prevented his body from absorbing nutrients, leading to his starvation.

But the book was published before the seeds' testing was completed by Dr. Thomas Clausen, the chair of the chemistry and biochemistry department at UAF. "I was hoping it was true," says Clausen, in his lab on campus. "It would have made a good story. But the scientific results worked against my biases. I tore that plant apart. There were no toxins. No alkaloids. I'd eat it myself."

Of course, this flies in the face of the McCandless that the public has embraced, and Krakauer's take has survived subsequent reprintings of the book. Now a version of his theory has made its way on-screen. In Penn's telling McCandless is poisoned by mistaking wild potato for a similar plant, wild sweet pea, though according to Clausen's research that plant is equally harmless. Brent Keith, my guide, suggests it was poisoned mushrooms, or giardiasis from drinking untreated water.

There's additional evidence McCandless needn't have wasted away. In July, a month before his death, he attempted to hike out of the bush, only to be turned away trying to cross the Teklanika. He failed to anticipate the change in water levels as the summer progressed and snowmelt increased. But as Krakauer noted - and a 9,000-word piece by Chip Brown in a February 1993 'New Yorker' made clear - had McCandless searched a bit farther downstream he would have discovered a manual tram over the river less than a mile from where he tried to cross, a detail missing from the film. The tragic truth may be that he didn't find a way out of the bush, couldn't catch enough food to survive, and simply starved to death. But no one will ever know the truth.With the mythology that has grown up around the story, it is easy to forget that McCandless was a real flesh-and-blood person, that those who knew him and loved him are still around. Westerberg, for example, has had his life transformed by their brief friendship. He picked McCandless up hitchhiking and gave him a job working at his grain elevator in Carthage, South Dakota. The boy told him his name was Alex, and they became good friends in the nearly two years before he left for Alaska. Westerberg was the one who helped identify the body.

I ask Westerberg if he feels as if the Alex he knew has been lost.

"Well, yeah," he says. "All this shadows the original story and clouds it to a point."

And what would McCandless have felt about all this? "I'm sure he's sitting up there smiling. He liked to write all those diaries," says Westerberg. "If he wouldn't have documented it there wouldn't have been a story."

McCandless clearly believed in self-mythologizing, in the power of storytelling and self-invention. Had he lived, perhaps he would have gained enough perspective to tell the story himself, rather than leaving it for others to tell. As it is, he has entered the realm of myth, and myths are shaped by those who can make use of them.

Penn, for one, doesn't feel conflicted by presenting McCandless's life on-screen, despite the mysteries. "I think the things that are most important are there," he says. "It was clear Chris made the decision to go back to the world. And he left an awful lot of clues, so you go with your gut. That's what I did." To criticize Hollywood for being Hollywood, for taking a real story and mythologizing it, is like telling a bear not to shit in the woods. It's what they do.

With a year-round population of around 200 and winter temperatures that frequently linger at 40 below, Cantwell is tucked in the shadow of the icy vastness of the Alaska Range. Everyone I met there spoke highly of the movie people. The production, which used almost every available ATV in town and hired many locals, was the biggest thing to happen there since the railroad came through nearly a century ago.

Penn's production company acquired a '40s-era International Harvester bus from a junkyard in Fairbanks, identical to the one out on the Stampede Trail, and set designers modeled it into a dead ringer of Fairbanks 142. It sits now in the crowded yard outside Gordon Carlson's house in Cantwell, not looking terribly out of place amid rusted machinery and old pickup trucks.

Carlson, a barrel-chested Athabascan who worked as a tribal liaison on the shoot, shows me around the bus. He chuckles through a handlebar mustache and offers an unburnished appraisal of McCandless: Another fool bit the dust. "We grew up here. You learn how to make a campfire when you're a kid. This, I didn't think much of it at the time. That kid's mistakes started a long time before he got here."

And what will happen to this bus?

"Not sure what we'll do with it. Make it some kind of attraction. Maybe a cappuccino stand. I know that sounds like we're profiting off someone else's story, but you do what you have to do to survive here."

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Fifteen years after an enigmatic 24-year-old walked 'Into the Wild,' the site of his death has become a shrine. As Hollywood weighs in with a portrait of the young man as a saintlike visionary, has the truth been lost? Inside the strange life and tragic death of "Alexander Supertramp."

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Authorities Have Rescued Yet Another Person Near The 'Into The Wild' Bus

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Authorities Have Rescued Yet Another Person Near The 'Into The Wild' Bus

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YouTube

Authorities in Alaska say they have rescued a 22-year-old man named Matthew Sharp near the abandoned bus made famous by the 1996 "Into the Wild" book and 2007 Into The Wild movie. Sharp was reportedly unable to hike back from the area surrounding the 1942 "Magic Bus" that sits on the Stampede Trail. Rising waters swept the hiker down the river, causing minor injuries. Troopers responded to distress signals set off by an emergency beacon and were able to fly Sharp back to Fairbanks via helicopter where he was treated for his injuries.

Sharp is just the most recent hiker authorities have either saved or recovered near the bus 24-year-old Chris McCandless lived, and died, inside in 1992. McCandless lived in the bus for two months while on a mission of self-discovery, before eventually starving to death. Rescuing hikers from the trail is a common occurrence for troopers. Recently, a woman drowned in the Teklanika River that runs not too far from the area the bus sits.

Sharp was injured as he was swept down the Alaskan river after waters rapidly rose. Crossing the river is necessary to get to where the 'Into The Wild' bus sits. In an email sent to CBC News Sharp detailed his account of how his journey up the trail almost turned deadly.

"Once I was about halfway across, the current overwhelmed me and dragged me and my [50 pounds of] gear down stream," Sharp said. "I got pretty beat up. While being dragged, I was able to grab a fallen tree and get to shore."

Sharp then wrote of the injuries he sustained, and how they began to get more painful as the adrenaline began to subside.

"At this point I started to feel how beat up I was; bruising to my legs, back, shoulders, and ankles," Sharp said. "By the next morning I was so sore that I was unable to carry my gear, let alone cross the rivers again and hike the 30km out."

Sharp then had no choice but to turn on his locator - an emergency gadget that alerts authorities of a life and death situation - and wait for help. The distress signal would save his life.

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

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Authorities Have Rescued Yet Another Person Near The 'Into The Wild' Bus

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Authorities in Alaska say they have rescued a 22-year-old man named Matthew Sharp near the abandoned bus made famous by the 1996 "Into the Wild" book and 2007 Into The Wild movie. Rising waters swept the hiker down the river, causing minor injuries.

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On September 12, 2013, I posted an article titled " How Chris McCandless Died" on this Web site, in which I reported that McCandless, the subject of my book "Into the Wild," seemed to have inadvertently poisoned himself in 1992, in the Alaska bush, by eating seeds from a plant known colloquially as wild potato, and known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum. In the first edition of my book, I had speculated that a toxic alkaloid in the seeds had significantly contributed to, if not caused, his death.

The debate over how McCandless died has persisted for two decades now, and many people have insisted that he simply starved to death. But I concluded that, were it not for these seeds, he might very well have survived. After reading an essay by a man named Ronald Hamilton on the apparent toxicity of the seeds that McCandless had eaten, I'd sent a hundred and fifty grams of H. alpinum seeds to Avomeen Analytical Services, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There, by means of a process called high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC), an Avomeen chemist determined that the seeds contained a potentially lethal concentration of a neurotoxin called beta-N-oxalyl-L-alpha-beta diaminopropionic acid, a non-protein amino acid commonly referred to as ODAP.

Five days after my piece was published, Dermot Cole, a journalist in Fairbanks, Alaska, posted an article called " Krakauer's Wild Theory on McCandless Gives Short Shrift to Science " on the Web site Alaska Dispatch. Cole wrote:

Krakauer should take the advice of Tom Clausen, the retired organic chemist from UAF who has spent much of his career studying plants in Alaska and their properties.

Clausen said that absent peer-reviewed scientific research he would not make any conclusions about what amounts to a highly technical and complicated scientific question.

The difference between a popular account for a general audience and a peer-reviewed journal is that an editor or two may check the former, while the latter will be subject to critical examination aimed at uncovering sloppy work.

Clausen said he has nothing to refute the conclusion, reached by both [Ron Hamilton] and Krakauer, that ODAP was present.

"With that said, let me follow with the comment that I am very skeptical about the entire story," Clausen wrote in an e-mail....

"I would be much more convinced if I was reading the report from a credible peer-reviewed professional."

Clausen, I realized, was right: I couldn't be absolutely certain that the seeds were toxic until I did additional, more sophisticated analysis, and published the results in a reputable peer-reviewed journal. So I embarked on another round of testing.

I began by asking Avomeen to analyze the seeds using a method called liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), which would give us a crucial piece of information not provided by the HPLC analysis: mass spectrometry would determine the molecular mass, or weight, of the compound in question. This analysis detected a prominent seed component with a molecular weight of 176-the molecular weight of ODAP is 176.13-which appeared to corroborate the earlier HPLC results.

Next, Avomeen suggested that we take the analysis to an even higher resolution, by using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). A sample of seeds was analyzed using two mass spectrometers connected by a chamber called a collision cell, in which the seeds' molecules were shattered into fragmentation ions. The second mass spectrometer sorted and weighed these fragments, producing a fragmentation-ion pattern that is unique for any given compound, and therefore functions like a molecular fingerprint. The results confirmed that the molecular weight of the component we were interested in is 176. But the fingerprint for this component didn't match the definitive fingerprint of a sample of pure ODAP that was also analyzed. The results were unequivocal: ODAP was not present in H. alpinum seeds. The LC-MS/MS analysis conclusively disproved Hamilton's hypothesis.

The analysis nevertheless suggested that a significant concentration of a compound structurally similar to ODAP might be present in the seeds. So I combed the scientific literature again, even more exhaustively this time, reading every paper I could find about toxic non-protein amino acids with a molecular mass of 176. Eventually, I discovered an article by a scientist named B. A. Birdsong, published in the Canadian Journal of Botany in 1960, which reported that H. alpinum seeds contain a toxic amino acid called L-canavanine. The mass of L-canavanine, it so happens, is 176.17.

I had missed this article in my earlier searches because I had been looking for a toxic alkaloid instead of a toxic amino acid. Clausen had been looking for a toxic alkaloid as well, when he and Edward Treadwell reported, in a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Ethnobotany Research & Applications, that " no chemical basis for toxicity could be found" in H. alpinum seeds.

Birdsong and his co-authors had determined the presence of L-canavanine in the seeds using paper chromatography and a spraying agent called trisodium pentacyanoammonioferrate, or PCAF. Given the controversy over the potential toxicity of H. alpinum, and because methods for plant-constituent analysis have advanced significantly in the fifty-four years since Birdsong's investigation, I asked Avomeen to evaluate the presence of L-canavanine in the seeds using LC-MS/MS, the same technique that had disproved the presence of ODAP. When the Avomeen scientists completed their work, they determined that H. alpinum seeds do indeed contain a significant concentration of L-canavanine: 1.2 per cent by weight.

Canavanine, it turns out, is an antimetabolite stored in the seeds of many leguminous species to ward off predators, and its toxicity in animals is well documented in scientific literature. Numerous cases have been observed of cattle being poisoned after foraging on jack beans ( Canavalia ensiformis), the seeds of which contain about 2.5 per cent canavanine by dry weight; symptoms include stiffness of the hindquarters, progressive weakness, emphysema, and hemorrhages of the lymph glands. Although there have been few clinical or epidemiological studies of canavanine-induced illness in humans, there have been anecdotal reports of toxic effects in people who have ingested jack-bean seeds. An article published in the prestigious German journal Die Pharmazie observed that "the scattered reports about poisoning by this plant probably stand in no relation to the actual number of incidences that are caused by it in agricultural practice, because the cause is so difficult to recognize."

Dr. Jonathan Southard, Dr. Ying Long, Dr. Andrew Kolbert, Dr. Shri Thanedar, and I co-authored a paper titled "Presence of L-canavanine in Hedysarum Alpinum Seeds and its Potential Role in the Death of Chris McCandless," which will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine in March, 2015. In the conclusion of our paper, we write:

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On September 12, 2013, I posted an article titled " How Chris McCandless Died" on this Web site, in which I reported that McCandless, the subject of my book "Into the Wild," seemed to have inadvertently poisoned himself in 1992, in the Alaska bush, by eating seeds from a plant known colloquially as wild potato, and known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum.

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Christopher McCandless Is No Longer My Hero

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Is Into the Wild's Chris McCandless a Hero?

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Is Into the Wild's Chris McCandless a Hero?

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Blue Ridge Outdoors

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Chris McCandless, also known by the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp, was an American hiker who sought an increasingly itinerant lifestyle as he grew up. He is the subject of Into the Wild, a nonfiction book by Jon Krakauer that was later made into a full-length feature film.

We asked our readers to sound off on what they thought of the Chris McCandless and his adventure. These are their answers:

"The dictionary's definition of a hero is a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities. Chris McCandless fits this definition perfectly. Ability he did not lack, and he had an abundance of courage with anything he tried. Chris was extraordinarily talented. He excelled in almost anything he attempted and let nothing stand in his way. During Chris's year and a half adventure around the Western United States he showed all of the qualities of a hero. He dropped everything he owned to take away the barriers that society had subconsciously imposed on him to discover who the real Chris McCandless was. A bold and stubborn risk it was, but more importantly Chris took the risk-something many people would never dream of even attempting because they can't predict the outcome. That's why Chris is a hero, because he did something so many can't. He set out on an adventure to enjoy what little time he had on this beautiful planet."
-Austin Peton, Blacksburg, Va.
"I think from a literary sense John Krakauer has made Chris McCandless an example of a hero. As a human being, I feel it's a shame that McCandless' life ended at such a young age. I wish he would have made better decisions in many of his outdoor pursuits and the way he dealt with his family, but as a character I believe he is an essential lesson in social progression. Currently in America, we are losing sight of the simple things through working too many hours, while we live among homogenized suburban trappings and big-box hell. Many times I have wanted to step away from it all and release my free spirit within. Reality inevitably prevents this. But every time I go back and read "Into the Wild" I can't help but feel inspired to at least make small changes in my life, appreciate my natural surroundings, and embrace the purest things around me, even if they aren't always easy to see. If McCandless can make me see these things, then personally I have no choice but to call him a hero."
- Jim Barry, Raleigh, N.C.

Many, many people waste away their lives being a slave to something (career, debt, etc.), not really ever being free from its grasp. Chris was just someone who did what we all should do: follow your heart.

"While many of the underlying principles by which he tried to lead his life are indeed admirable, I don't believe he can be called hero. Like many of us, he found that the societal trappings of everyday life in America made him long for a more simple existence. The reason however that many of the rest of us choose not to walk away is that we have a responsibility to those we love and those that love us. There's a point in a person's life where they must realize that they do not just live for themselves. Christopher McCandless was unfortunately too selfish to ever come to this realization. He instead chose to put his family through what I could only imagine must have been two years of hell without so much as a whisper of his whereabouts. Could you do such a thing to your loved ones? A hero, in my mind, must be selfless-someone who puts the lives of others above their own. Christopher McCandless does not fit that description."

- Jeremiah Leroy, Asheville, N.C.

"It's cool that he went out and explored the world and didn't get caught up in society's expectations. That's great-I'm all for it. Many, many people waste away their lives being a slave to something (career, debt, etc.), not really ever being free from its grasp. Chris was just someone who did what we all should do: follow your heart. This doesn't make him a hero, but it does make him pure and true."

- Jon Livenood, Knoxville, Tenn.

"Chris McCandless was a troubled young man who tried to live off the land in the wilds of Alaska and starved to death. He went into the bush without bothering to master necessary skills. He didn't have a map, wore jeans (a real sign of a newbie), and carried 10 lbs of rice but no crampons. McCandless had no respect for wilderness, too much arrogance, or maybe he just wasn't thinking. He was not a kid or a boy; he was a 24 year old man. If Chris had a map, he would have seen that the safe way out, the best way to cross the river was only a half-mile down where there was a gauging station built by the U.S. Geological Survey. That's how Jon Krakauer, the author of "Into the Wild," and his companions reached the bus. Chris wanted to go into Alaska as terra incognito but there was a bus there and cabins a few miles away. How incognito could it be? In a documentary about the movie, Krackauer explained McCandless' thinking: "If the whole world is mapped, then don't look at the map." That's suicidal."

- Danny Bernstein, Asheville, N.C.

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Chris McCandless - Wilderness Hero or Foolish Youth?

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Chris McCandless, also known by the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp, was an American hiker who sought an increasingly itinerant lifestyle as he grew up. He is the subject of Into the Wild , a nonfiction book by Jon Krakauer that was later made into a full-length feature film.

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Aerial America, Smithsonian Channel

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Twenty-one years ago this month, on September 6, 1992, the decomposed body of Christopher McCandless was discovered by moose hunters just outside the northern boundary of Denali National Park. He had died inside a rusting bus that served as a makeshift shelter for trappers, dog mushers, and other backcountry visitors. Taped to the door was a note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol:

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 ?

From a cryptic diary found among his possessions, it appeared that McCandless had been dead for nineteen days. A driver's license issued eight months before he perished indicated that he was twenty-four years old and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. After his body was flown out of the wilderness, an autopsy determined that it weighed sixty-seven pounds and lacked discernible subcutaneous fat. The probable cause of death, according to the coroner's report, was starvation.

In "Into the Wild," the book I wrote about McCandless's brief, confounding life, I came to a different conclusion. I speculated that he had inadvertently poisoned himself by eating seeds from a plant commonly called wild potato, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum. According to my hypothesis, a toxic alkaloid in the seeds weakened McCandless to such a degree that it became impossible for him to hike out to the highway or hunt effectively, leading to starvation. Because Hedysarum alpinum is described as a nontoxic species in both the scientific literature and in popular books about edible plants, my conjecture was met with no small amount of derision, especially in Alaska.

I've received thousands of letters from people who admire McCandless for his rejection of conformity and materialism in order to discover what was authentic and what was not, to test himself, to experience the raw throb of life without a safety net. But I've also received plenty of mail from people who think he was an idiot who came to grief because he was arrogant, woefully unprepared, mentally unbalanced, and possibly suicidal. Most of these detractors believe my book glorifies a senseless death. As the columnist Craig Medred wrote in the Anchorage Daily News in 2007,

"Into the Wild" is a misrepresentation, a sham, a fraud. There, I've finally said what somebody has needed to say for a long time .... Krakauer took a poor misfortunate prone to paranoia, someone who left a note talking about his desire to kill the "false being within," someone who managed to starve to death in a deserted bus not far off the George Parks Highway, and made the guy into a celebrity. Why the author did that should be obvious. He wanted to write a story that would sell.

The debate over why McCandless perished, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering, and occasionally flaring, for more than two decades now. But last December, a writer named Ronald Hamilton posted a paper on the Internet that brings fascinating new facts to the discussion. Hamilton, it turns out, has discovered hitherto unknown evidence that appears to close the book on the cause of McCandless's death.

To appreciate the brilliance of Hamilton's investigative work, some backstory is helpful. The diary and photographs recovered with McCandless's body indicated that, beginning on June 24, 1992, the roots of the Hedysarum alpinum plant became a staple of his daily diet. On July 14th, he started harvesting and eating Hedysarum alpinum seeds as well. One of his photos depicts a one-gallon Ziploc bag stuffed with these seeds. When I visited the bus in July, 1993, wild-potato plants were growing everywhere I looked in the surrounding taiga. I filled a one-gallon bag with more than a pound of seeds in less than thirty minutes.

On July 30th, McCandless wrote in his journal, " EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT[ATO] SEED. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP. STARVING. GREAT JEOPARDY. " Before this entry, there was nothing in the journal to suggest that he was in dire straits, although his photos show he'd grown alarmingly gaunt. After subsisting for three months on a marginal diet of squirrels, porcupines, small birds, mushrooms, roots, and berries, he'd run up a huge caloric deficit and was teetering on the brink. By adding potato seeds to the menu, he apparently made the mistake that took him down. After July 30th, his physical condition went to hell, and three weeks later he was dead.

When McCandless's body was found in the Alaskan bush, Outside magazine asked me to write about the puzzling circumstances of his demise. Working on a tight deadline, I researched and wrote an eighty-four-hundred-word piece, published in January, 1993. Because the wild potato was universally believed to be safe to eat, in this article I speculated that McCandless had mistakenly consumed the seeds of the wild sweet pea, Hedysarum mackenzii-a plant thought to be toxic, and which is hard to distinguish from Hedysarum alpinum. I attributed his death to this blunder.

As I began expanding my article into a book and had more time to ponder the evidence, however, it struck me as extremely unlikely that he'd failed to tell the two species apart. He wrote his diary on blank pages in the back of an exhaustively researched field guide to the region's edible plants, "Tanaina Plantlore / Dena'ina K'et'una: An Ethnobotany of the Dena'ina Indians of Southcentral Alaska," by Priscilla Russell Kari. In the book, Kari explicitly warns that because wild sweet pea closely resembles wild potato, and "is reported to be poisonous, care should be taken to identify them accurately before attempting to use the wild potato as food." And then she explains precisely how to distinguish the two plants from one another.

It seemed more plausible that McCandless had indeed eaten the roots and seeds of the purportedly nontoxic wild potato rather than the wild sweet pea. So I sent some Hedysarum alpinum seeds I'd collected near the bus to Dr. Thomas Clausen, a professor in the biochemistry department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, for analysis.

Shortly before my book was published, Clausen and one of his graduate students, Edward Treadwell, conducted a preliminary test that indicated the seeds contained an unidentified alkaloid. Making a rash intuitive leap, in the first edition of "Into the Wild," published in January, 1996, I wrote that this alkaloid was perhaps swainsonine, a toxic agent known to inhibit glycoprotein metabolism in animals, leading to starvation. When Clausen and Treadwell completed their analysis of wild-potato seeds, though, they found no trace of swainsonine or any other alkaloids. "I tore that plant apart," Dr. Clausen explained to Men's Journal in 2007, after also testing the seeds for non-alkaloid compounds. "There were no toxins. No alkaloids. I'd eat it myself."

I was perplexed. Clausen was an esteemed organic chemist, and the results of his analysis seemed irrefutable. But McCandless's July 30th journal entry couldn't have been more explicit: " EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT[ATO] SEED. " His certainty about the cause of his failing health gnawed at me. I began sifting through the scientific literature, searching for information that would allow me to reconcile McCandless's adamantly unambiguous statement with Clausen's equally unambiguous test results.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago, when I stumbled upon Ronald Hamilton's paper " The Silent Fire: ODAP and the Death of Christopher McCandless," which Hamilton had posted on a Web site that publishes essays and papers about McCandless. Hamilton's essay offered persuasive new evidence that the wild-potato plant is highly toxic in and of itself, contrary to the assurances of Thomas Clausen and every other expert who has ever weighed in on the subject. The toxic agent in Hedysarum alpinum turns out not to be an alkaloid but, rather, an amino acid, and according to Hamilton it was the chief cause of McCandless's death. His theory validates my conviction that McCandless wasn't as clueless and incompetent as his detractors have made him out to be.

Hamilton is neither a botanist nor a chemist; he's a writer who until recently worked as a bookbinder at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania library. As Hamilton explains it, he became acquainted with the McCandless story in 2002, when he happened upon a copy of "Into the Wild," flipped through its pages, and suddenly thought to himself, I know why this guy died. His hunch derived from his knowledge of Vapniarca, a little-known Second World War concentration camp in what was then German-occupied Ukraine.

"I first learned about Vapniarca through a book whose title I've long forgotten," Hamilton told me. "Only the barest account of Vapniarca appeared in one of its chapters .... But after reading 'Into the Wild,' I was able to track down a manuscript about Vapniarca that has been published online." Later, in Romania, he located the son of a man who served as an administrative official at the camp, who sent Hamilton a trove of documents.

In 1942, as a macabre experiment, an officer at Vapniarca started feeding the Jewish inmates bread made from seeds of the grass pea, Lathyrus sativus, a common legume that has been known since the time of Hippocrates to be toxic. "Very quickly," Hamilton writes in "The Silent Fire,"

a Jewish doctor and inmate at the camp, Dr. Arthur Kessler, understood what this implied, particularly when within months, hundreds of the young male inmates of the camp began limping, and had begun to use sticks as crutches to propel themselves about. In some cases inmates had been rapidly reduced to crawling on their backsides to make their ways through the compound .... Once the inmates had ingested enough of the culprit plant, it was as if a silent fire had been lit within their bodies. There was no turning back from this fire-once kindled, it would burn until the person who had eaten the grasspea would ultimately be crippled .... The more they'd eaten, the worse the consequences-but in any case, once the effects had begun, there was simply no way to reverse them .... The disease is called, simply, neurolathyrism, or more commonly, "lathyrism."...

Kessler, who ... initially recognized the sinister experiment that had been undertaken at Vapniarca, was one of those who escaped death during those terrible times. He retired to Israel once the war had ended and there established a clinic to care for, study, and attempt to treat the numerous victims of lathyrism from Vapniarca, many of whom had also relocated in Israel.

It's been estimated that, in the twentieth century, more than a hundred thousand people worldwide were permanently paralyzed from eating grass pea. The injurious substance in the plant turned out to be a neurotoxin, beta-N-oxalyl-L-alpha-beta diaminoproprionic acid, a compound commonly referred to as beta- ODAP or, more often, just ODAP. Curiously, Hamilton reports, ODAP

affects different people, different sexes, and even different age groups in different ways. It even affects people within those age groups differently .... The one constant about ODAP poisoning, however, very simply put, is this: those who will be hit the hardest are always young men between the ages of 15 and 25 and who are essentially starving or ingesting very limited calories, who have been engaged in heavy physical activity, and who suffer trace-element shortages from meager, unvaried diets.

ODAP was identified in 1964. It brings about paralysis by over-stimulating nerve receptors, causing them to die. As Hamilton explains,

It isn't clear why, but the most vulnerable neurons to this catastrophic breakdown are the ones that regulate leg movement.... And when sufficient neurons die, paralysis sets in.... [The condition] never gets better; it always gets worse. The signals get weaker and weaker until they simply cease altogether. The victim experiences "much trouble just to stand up." Many become rapidly too weak to walk. The only thing left for them to do at that point is to crawl....

After Hamilton read "Into the Wild" and became convinced that ODAP was responsible for McCandless's sad end, he approached Dr. Jonathan Southard, the assistant chair of the chemistry department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and persuaded Southard to have one of his students, Wendy Gruber, test the seeds of both Hedysarum alpinum and Hedysarum mackenzii for ODAP. Upon completion of her tests, in 2004, Gruber determined that ODAP appeared to be present in both species of Hedysarum, but her results were less than conclusive. "To be able to say that ODAP is definitely present in the seeds," she reported, "we would need to use another dimension of analysis, probably by H.P.L.C.-M.S."-high-pressure liquid chromatography. But Gruber possessed neither the expertise nor the resources to analyze the seeds with H.P.L.C., so Hamilton's hypothesis remained unproven.

To establish once and for all whether Hedysarum alpinum is toxic, last month I sent a hundred and fifty grams of freshly collected wild-potato seeds to Avomeen Analytical Services, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for H.P.L.C. analysis. Dr. Craig Larner, the chemist who conducted the test, determined that the seeds contained .394 per cent beta- ODAP by weight, a concentration well within the levels known to cause lathyrism in humans.

According to Dr. Fernand Lambein, a Belgian scientist who coördinates the Cassava Cyanide Diseases and Neurolathyrism Network, occasional consumption of foodstuffs containing ODAP "as one component of an otherwise balanced diet, bears not any risk of toxicity." Lambein and other experts warn, however, that individuals suffering from malnutrition, stress, and acute hunger are especially sensitive to ODAP, and are thus highly susceptible to the incapacitating effects of lathyrism after ingesting the neurotoxin.

Considering that potentially crippling levels of ODAP are found in wild-potato seeds, and given the symptoms McCandless described and attributed to the wild-potato seeds he ate, there is ample reason to believe that McCandless contracted lathyrism from eating those seeds. As Ronald Hamilton observed, McCandless exactly matched the profile of those most susceptible to ODAP poisoning:

He was a young, thin man in his early 20s, experiencing an extremely meager diet; who was hunting, hiking, climbing, leading life at its physical extremes, and who had begun to eat massive amounts of seeds containing a toxic [amino acid]. A toxin that targets persons exhibiting and experiencing precisely those characteristics and conditions ....

It might be said that Christopher McCandless did indeed starve to death in the Alaskan wild, but this only because he'd been poisoned, and the poison had rendered him too weak to move about, to hunt or forage, and, toward the end, "extremely weak," "too weak to walk out," and, having "much trouble just to stand up." He wasn't truly starving in the most technical sense of that condition. He'd simply become slowly paralyzed. And it wasn't arrogance that had killed him, it was ignorance. Also, it was ignorance which must be forgiven, for the facts underlying his death were to remain unrecognized to all, scientists and lay people alike, literally for decades.

Hamilton's discovery that McCandless perished because he ate toxic seeds is unlikely to persuade many Alaskans to regard McCandless in a more sympathetic light, but it may prevent other backcountry foragers from accidentally poisoning themselves. Had McCandless's guidebook to edible plants warned that Hedysarum alpinum seeds contain a neurotoxin that can cause paralysis, he probably would have walked out of the wild in late August with no more difficulty than when he walked into the wild in April, and would still be alive today. If that were the case, Chris McCandless would now be forty-five years old.
Jon Krakauer's most recent books are "Three Cups of Deceit," "Where Men Win Glory," and "Under the Banner of Heaven." Above: Chris McCandless's final photo, a self-portrait holding his farewell note. Photographs courtesy the family of Chris McCandless.

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Twenty-one years ago this month, on September 6, 1992, the decomposed body of Christopher McCandless was discovered by moose hunters just outside the northern boundary of Denali National Park. He had died inside a rusting bus that served as a makeshift shelter for trappers, dog mushers, and other backcountry visitors.

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Another 'Into the Wild' Pilgrimage Has Ended in Death

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Another 'Into the Wild' Pilgrimage Has Ended in Death

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Outside Magazine

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A 24-year-old Belarusian woman died while attempting to reach the abandoned bus made famous by Christopher McCandless and Into the Wild.

Veranika Nikanava and her husband, 24-year-old Piotr Markielau, were crossing Alaska's Teklanika River, just outside Denali National Park, when Nikanava lost her footing and was swept away. Markielau made it to shore and was able to retrieve his wife's body downstream. He contacted the Alaska State Troopers just before midnight on July 25, and was retrieved by a police officer and volunteer firefighters on ATVs. According to Ken Marsh, a spokesman for the troopers, the couple had been married for less than a month.

The river is the primary obstacle in the popular but dangerous hike to the bus. It's fast and cold, and can run waist-high or worse in high water. Sometimes there's a rope strung across it, intended to help hikers. But that doesn't guaranteesafety: Nikanava reportedly lost her grip on the rope when she fell. In 2010, another young hiker, Claire Ackermann of Switzerland, drowned in the Teklanika under similar circumstances.

The bus sits 20 miles down the Stampede Trail, and roughly ten miles past the river crossing. A longtime shelter for hunters passing by in the fall, in the summer of 1992 it was home to Chris McCandless for several months. McCandless had been roaming and adventuring across North America for a couple of years before he wound up on the outskirts of Denali, where he hoped to survive off the land. He crossed the river and found his way to the bus in April, with winter still holding on. Later that summer, hungry and hoping to retreat, he found his way back blocked by the river at high water. He died in the bus in late August, and was found by moose hunters in September.

His story was first told in a classic Outside feature by Jon Krakauer, "Death of an Innocent." Krakauer published a book-length version, Into the Wild, in 1996, and soon after that, a trickle of pilgrims, inspired by McCandless' idealism and commitment to living life on his own terms, began making their way to the bus. The trickle increased after the film adaptation of Into the Wild was released in 2007, and by the time I found my way to the Stampede Trail in 2013 to write a story on the " McCandless pilgrims " phenomenon, locals estimated that a couple hundred hikers were seeking the "Magic Bus" each year.

On that trip, the chief of the local fire department told me he'd already rescued a dozen pilgrims during that summer season alone. When I hiked to the river to see it for myself, I watched three hikers get swept downstream by the current. (They survived with minor injuries.) I heard rumors that locals planned to blow up the abandoned hulk in order to solve the problem; a few years later, a local newspaper columnist wrote that he'd always figured "two cans of gas and a match" offered a similar solution.

This second death will likely renew the conversation about whether or not to remove or destroy the bus. But it's just as likely, given the remote location and the costs involved, that nothing will change this time, either. Twenty-seven years after McCandless' death, his story continues to capture the imaginations of young people-many of them, now, not even born yet when he died. It's hard to squelch that kind of emotion.

In a statement, the Alaska State Troopers urged travelers to "come prepared" for Alaska's wilderness, and its "challenging weather, water, and geographical conditions." That's good advice. My own advice? Find another hike, another trail-there are plenty of them. There are better ways to honor an adventurer you admired than by following a dangerously well-worn path.

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Another 'Into the Wild' Pilgrimage Has Ended in Death

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A 24-year-old Belarusian woman died while attempting to reach the abandoned bus made famous by Christopher McCandless and Into the Wild. Veranika Nikanava and her husband, 24-year-old Piotr Markielau, were crossing Alaska's Teklanika River, just outside Denali National Park, when Nikanava lost her footing and was swept away.

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Missing teen found dead, fascinated with 'Into the Wild' - CNN

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Before he went missing, Johnathan Croom had developed an obsession with the movie "Into the Wild," in which a young man leaves society to go live off the land.

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20/20 - Rare TV Show about Chris McCandless (Alexander Supertramp) from Into the Wild

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In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and , unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.

Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interest that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the dries and desires that propelled McCandless. Digging deeply, he takes an inherently compelling mystery and unravels the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons.

When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity , and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding-and not an ounce of sentimentality. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's storytelling blaze through every page.

The Movie, by Sean Penn

" There is pleasure in the pathless woods, There is rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep sea and the music in its roar; I love not man the less, but Nature more. " - Lord Byron

Freshly graduated from college with a promising future, 22 year-old Christopher McCandless (EMILE HIRSCH) instead walked out of his privileged life and into the wild in search of adventure. What happened to him on the way transformed this young wanderer into an enduring symbol for countless people. Was Christopher McCandless a heroic adventurer or a naïve idealist, a rebellious 1990s Thoreau or another lost American son, a fearless risk-taker or a tragic figure who wrestled with the precarious balance between man and nature?

Each strand of his journey is woven into Sean Penn's screen adaptation of Jon Krakauer's acclaimed bestseller, Into The Wild, which is as much about the insatiable yearning for family, home and connection as it is the search for truth and happiness.

McCandless' quest took him from the wheat fields of South Dakota to a renegade trip down the Colorado River to the non-conformists' refuge of Slab City, California, and beyond. Along the way, he encountered a series of colorful characters at the very edges of American society who shaped his understanding of life and whose lives he, in turn, changed. In the end, he tested himself by heading alone into the wilds of the great North, where everything he had seen and learned and felt came to a head in ways he never could have expected.

The Soundtrack, by Eddie Vedder

Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder is one of rock's most distinctive voices. The vocalist remains one of the most passionate and engaging frontmen in rock. In 2007, Vedder was asked by friend Sean Penn to contribute music for his fourth feature-film Into the Wild about the young life of Christopher McCandless and his journey into the Alaskan wilderness.

Produced by Vedder and Adam Kasper, the soundtrack to Into the Wild is Vedder's first full-length solo release. The songs are a mix of the rock-inspired tracks that he's known for with Pearl Jam with folk-driven songs that are almost reminiscent of the musical accompaniment of Cat Stevens. Featuring contributions from former Sleater-Kinney singer/guitarist Corin Tucker and singer/songwriter/guitarist Jerry Hannan, the soundtrack is a wonderfully enchanting, haunting, and inspirational album that not only showcases Vedder's talents but also the serene, harrowing tone of Sean Penn's film.

Setting Forth is a jangly-inspired track with hard-hitting bass drums led by Vedder's awe-inspiring vocals as he sets the tone for the entire album in this short, mid-tempo number. The track also includes Vedder playing some jangly-like guitar riffs and melodies that is also accompanied by acoustic backgrounds. No Ceiling is a slower, folk-driven song accompanied mostly by a banjo and a soft, slide guitar in the background. Vedder's narrative-style lyrics definitely tells the story of Christopher McCandless going onto his journey to Alaska. Far Behind is a mid-tempo rocker that fans of Pearl Jam will definitely familiarize themselves with as the two-minute track is a nice accompanying track for a good road song. And no, this is not a cover of the song by fellow Seattle band Candlebox.

Rise is a mandolin-driven track that continues the road-inspired narrative from Vedder's lyrics as the song reflects McCandless' journey while looking back at what he's leaving behind. The two-and-a-half minute track is definitely an inspirational track with Vedder's vocals being the highlight. Long Nights is an eerie track led by Vedder's bass-like vocals and jangly-guitar flourishes that emphasizes McCandless' isolation in the city and everything that he despises. Vedder's vocals and lyrics reflects the sense of confusion in the film's protagonist as Vedder's guitar playing is wonderfully inspiring. The one-minute instrumental Tuolumne is Vedder playing an acoustic guitar with wonderful melodies and riffs that conveys McCandless' innocence into his exploration of nature.

The album's first single Hard Sun is a cover of a Gordon Peterson song under his Indio pseudonym. The five-minute, inspirational song is played in the film's final credits. The lyrics are definitely uplifting and reflect on McCandless' journey. Vedder sings the song with his growling vocal style while accompanied by Corin Tucker. The song is played as a folk-rocker largely accompanied by an acoustic guitar that is followed by a drone-like guitar track that becomes a solo later on.

Society is a Jerry Hannan-composed song that is mostly an acoustic ballad in the style of Cat Stevens. Vedder's vocals definitely set the tone without being too soft as the song definitely plays as an accompaniment to McCandless' journey and isolation with the world. The Wolf is a score piece of Vedder playing an organ that is also accompanied by Vedder's wailing vocals. The track is played during McCandless' confrontation with the harshness that is nature.

End Of The Road is a slow but elegant track with Vedder playing flourishing guitar chords as he sings the song filled with his lyrics of McCandless' journey. The song is a wonderful cut that plays to the film's theme of movement as it emphasizes McCandless' journey and the people he met on the way. The album closer, Guaranteed, is a folk-driven track that features Vedder in his most romantic as the song is played with just Vedder and his flourishing, acoustic guitar. The song is amazing with its imagery and is played during some lovely scenes of nature that revel in McCandless' innocence and the tragedy that would follow. It includes lyrics that Vedder says he penned specifically for Chris's sister Carine McCandless. After the song is played for three minutes, there's two minutes of silence until it returns with Vedder basically humming. The result is a calm, serene closer that ends the album very nicely.

The album in digital form, notably on iTunes features four extra tracks that include two original songs by Vedder along with a live version of one of those songs and a live cover of Phil Ochs' Here's To The State.

While the only complaint of the record is that it's 33-minutes (in CD form) - a bit short in comparison to other albums, the soundtrack to Into the Wild remains an inspirational album from Eddie Vedder. Fans of Vedder's vocals and various side-projects will no doubt enjoy this album. Anyone who loved Penn's enchanting drama should get the soundtrack since the music works very well with the film. In the end, the soundtrack to Sean Penn's Into the Wild is a fantastic, enchanting, and spiritual album from Eddie Vedder.

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In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself.

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Eddie Vedder & Sean Penn: Into The Wild (Charlie Rose, 2007)

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Eddie Vedder & Sean Penn: Into The Wild (Charlie Rose, 2007)

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Eddie Vedder & Sean Penn: Into The Wild (Charlie Rose, 9/21/2007)

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Outside Magazine

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On the isolated shore of the Savage River, in the backcountry of interior Alaska, there's a small memorial to a deceased woman named Claire Ackermann. A pile of rocks sits on a metal plaque with an inscription that reads, in part: "To stay put is to exist; to travel is to live."

Three years ago, Ackermann, 29, and her boyfriend, Etienne Gros, 27, tried to cross the Teklanika River, a couple of miles west from the Savage. They tied themselves to a rope that somebody had run from one bank to the other, to aid such attempts. The Teklanika is powerful in summertime, and about halfway across they lost their footing. The rope dipped into the water, and Ackermann and Gros, still tied on, were pulled under by its weight. Gros grabbed a knife, cut himself loose, and swam to shore. He waded back out to try and rescue Ackermann, but it was too late-she had already drowned. He cut her loose and swam with her body 300 yards downstream, where he dragged her to land on the river's far shore. His attempts at CPR were useless.

Ackermann, who was from Switzerland, and Gros, a Frenchman, had been hiking the Stampede Trail, a route made famous by Christopher McCandless, who walked it in April 1992. Many people now know about McCandless and how the 24-year-old idealist bailed out of his middle-class suburban life, donated his $24,000 in savings to charity, and embarked on a two-year hitchhiking odyssey that led him to Alaska and the deserted Fairbanks City Transit bus number 142, which still sits, busted and rusting, 20 miles down the Stampede Trail. For 67 days, he ate mostly squirrel, ptarmigan, and porcupine, then he shaved his beard, packed his bag, and started walking back toward the highway. But a raging Teklanika prevented him from crossing, so he returned to the bus and hunkered down. More than a month later, a moose hunter found McCandless's decomposed body in a sleeping bag inside the bus, where he had starved to death.

This tragic story was told by Jon Krakauer in the January 1993 issue of Outside and later in his bestselling 1997 book, Into the Wild. The book, and a 2007 film directed by Sean Penn, helped elevate the McCandless saga to the status of modern myth. And that, in turn, has given rise to a unique and curious phenomenon in Alaska: McCandless pilgrims, inspired by his story, who are determined to see the bus for themselves. Each year, scores of trekkers journey down the Stampede Trail to visit it. They camp at the bus for days, sometimes weeks, write essays in the various logbooks stowed inside, and ponder the impact that McCandless's antimaterialist ethic, free-spirited travels, and time in the Alaskan wild has had on how they perceive the world.

UNFORTUNATELY, A LOT OF THESE people get into trouble, and almost always because of the Teklanika. In a recent story, writer Eva Holland reported that, in the summer of 2013 alone, a dozen people had been "lost, hurt or stranded by the rising river" on the Stampede Trail and had required rescue. When I was in the area in September, I heard similar numbers from the local authorities who run those operations. I also witnessed, and occasionally became involved in, some of the rescues.

In September, five employees of the Grand, a hotel near the entrance to Denali National Park, had been walking to the bus as a way to pass two days they had off. The cool weather often makes autumn a safer time for the hike, but a string of rainy days had swollen the Teklanika to flood stage. Two hikers, Matthew Grigg and Scott Wilkerson, crossed first, making it to the far shore. Then they watched as the other three slipped into the cold, gray water.

Elizabeth Kubik, the only woman in the group, swam to the far bank and reached for a willow branch, but it was dead and came out of the ground when she grabbed it. She reached for another branch and was able to secure a grip. Wilkerson lifted her and her pack out of the water before giving a hand to another of the swimmers, Jake Zyrek, who was also clutching a branch. When Zyrek made it to land, his lips were purple; he was shaking so violently he could hardly speak.

One last hiker, Rick Johnson, remained in the water, unable to get out. He was the farthest from either bank when he lost his footing and fell into the water, making his swim more arduous. Grigg chased him downstream, trying to keep one eye on his bobbing head, but because the bank rises into bluffs and cliffs, he sometimes couldn't tell where Johnson was. A hunter riding an ATV on the far shore shouted over the rush of the river, directing Grigg to Johnson. Johnson stayed in the water, which lingers at temperatures just above freezing, for 15 minutes. Grigg was finally able to pull him out of the current just before he hit a stretch of Class V rapids.

I walked down the trail the next day, running into two bearded Texans who were heading back to the highway. They told me that five people were stuck on the other side of the river and that they were on their way to notify troopers. When I arrived at the river, I saw the stranded hikers, clad in rain jackets and beanies, napping on the ground. They shouted that they had been there for a day and a half and that help was on the way. I asked if it was worth it, and they shouted in unison, "No!"

I dropped my pack and walked along the river's edge, meandering between gravel bars and yellowing willows as the low sun gilded the water. After a couple of miles, I turned back toward where the trail hits the river. On the bus side, I spotted two moose hunters driving Argos, six-wheeled amphibious vehicles. I ran down the rocky bank, waving my arms and shouting, until they stopped and got out. I yelled that people were stuck on their side of the river, unable to cross back. The group of five hikers eventually found the Argos drivers, crossed the river in the vehicles, and headed back to town that night.

Unaware of the impromptu rescue, two troopers and two firefighters arrived on ATVs the next morning, squinting across the bank, looking for hikers in need of help. When I told them what had happened, they rolled their eyes. They pulled out crackers and meat sticks as they talked about the trail, each giving his suggestion for what to do with the bus: lift it by helicopter, place it on the highway side of the river, or put it in the national park and make it "their problem."

The troopers told me that 75 percent of all of the rescues they perform in the area happen on the Stampede Trail. "Obviously, there's something that draws these people out here," one of the troopers, who asked not to be named, told me. "It's some kind of internal thing within them that makes them go out to that bus. I don't know what it is. I don't understand. What would possess a person to follow in the tracks of someone who died because he was unprepared?"

I WENT TO ALASKA FOR the first time in the summer of 2011, on a grant to report and write radio stories in a small town in southeast Alaska. At summer's end, I went farther north, spending an extra month and a half with my traveling partner, Jonathan, both of us living out of a 1993 Jeep Cherokee we nicknamed Muskeg, which had dented armor, a cracked windshield, and a missing tailgate handle. Jonathan and I drove 3,500 miles along seven of interior Alaska's highways, reporting stories for Alaska Public Radio along the way.

It was Jonathan who first suggested we do a story about the McCandless seekers. The phenomenon is well-known in Alaska-a source of enduring controversy. Every summer, newspapers in Anchorage and Fairbanks publish reports about search-and-rescue episodes on the trail, which invariably prompt online catcalls from Alaskans, who tend to dismiss McCandless as a greenhorn who had no business in the northern wilderness.

Jonathan and I put the idea on our story list, and as we traveled around the state, we read Into the Wild to each other over the clatter of Muskeg's engine. We soon felt the story's pull. I was 20, Jonathan was 22, and McCandless's uninhibited adventures spoke to both of us.

One August afternoon that summer, we drove to Stampede Road, left Muskeg where the pavement turns to dirt, and started walking toward the bus. A few miles in, we arrived at the Savage River, the first major waterway between the trailhead and Bus 142, and searched its shore for a good place to cross. A lanky French hiker, who turned out to be Etienne Gros, came bounding out of the woods. His lethal incident on the Teklanika with Ackermann had happened the year before; this year, he said, he had hoped to lead her sister and mother down the trail to show them where Claire had died. But the Savage's heaving water was too strong for them to cross, so they turned back. Gros escorted the Ackermanns to a motel in town and then returned with a friend to build the memorial.

As we stood next to the gushing gray water, Gros told us about the two months he and Ackermann had spent traveling in Alaska and Canada before their lethal encounter with the Teklanika. They'd met up in Vancouver-the beginning of what was supposed to be a two-year journey around the world. They hadn't planned to hike to the bus originally, but they'd gone to Denali National Park the day before, where they met two French hikers who told them it was possible to hike to the bus. They changed their plans and decided to go. It was the end of summer, and they thought they might see the aurora borealis. Gros told us how beautiful the weather had been and how beautiful they found the trail. There's a photograph of them on the trail, taken not long before the river crossing, in which they're both laughing-the last picture taken of Ackermann before her death. As Gros recalled the incident on the river, he was quick to defend her, emphasizing how experienced she was as a scuba diver and mountaineer.

Jonathan and I said our goodbyes, and a couple of hours later we arrived at the Teklanika. We followed the bank upriver to a spot where the water splits into three braids. We unloaded a pack raft, and Jonathan practiced his paddling in an eddy. Gaining confidence, we piled in and ferried our bags and ourselves across the swift, silt-filled water, pausing on gravel bars along the way. On the other side, looking for a place to set up camp, we noticed two tents and a hammock nestled among black spruce. Three dazed backpackers emerged. One of them, Phil Shoup, an older man from Tennessee, started yelling, "Glory! Hallelujah! They're heaven sent!"

One of the others, Dan Sans Clarasó, a young backpacker from Spain, crawled out of his hammock. It had been Clarasó's idea to hike to the bus. He'd convinced his two traveling friends, Shoup and Lleques Seques, another backpacker from Spain, to come with him. They made it to the bus, crossing the Teklanika when it was knee-deep. But they had returned to find it surging over its banks.

Crossing back seemed potentially fatal, so they'd waited for several days. They watched the river continue to swell with late-summer rains, sleeping much of the day to pass the time. Eventually, they started running out of food. No one knew they were out there. They'd been stuck for days by the time we arrived.

We attempted to ferry them back across the river, but Shoup, a large man, weighed 100 pounds more than the raft's weight limit. When he and Jonathan got in, the raft's edges sagged beneath the waterline, and it started filling up with water. Shoup walked back to his campsite that night in wet clothes, defeated. Jonathan and I ran back to town the next day with Clarasó-Lleques stayed behind with Shoup-to notify the authorities. Soon a helicopter was on its way to rescue them.

Enamored with the spot, many write that they could see why McCandless stayed. One man described his plans to call his parents for the first time in eight years, and another said he would propose to his significant other when he returned from the trail.

I RETURNED TO ALASKA LAST summer on a journalism grant to research the McCandless pilgrims more thoroughly. I lived in a one-room cabin without water or electricity, on an 80-acre homestead a couple of miles north of Stampede Road, bouncing between the neighboring worlds of pilgrims and locals.

The Magic Bus, as McCandless called it in a short note in the back of his field guide to plants, was dragged into the backcountry north of Denali National Park in the 1960s by a D-9 Caterpillar. Fitted with bunks and a barrel stove, Fairbanks 142 and two other buses housed workers who were building a road out to an antimony mine on Stampede Creek. That project was eventually halted, and the other buses were hauled back to town. But one of the axles on Bus 142 had broken, so it was left in the bush.

These days the trail is an overgrown dirt road, punctuated by beaver ponds, creeks, and two glacial rivers, the Savage and the Teklanika. There has been some push from Claire Ackermann's family, along with Chris McCandless's younger sister, Carine, and a few others, to build a footbridge across the Teklanika for safer crossings, but so far those plans haven't gone anywhere, and the river remains a danger to those attempting to ford it.

Stories of trouble are in abundant supply. One hiker I met, from South Korea, told me he had been swept 500 feet downstream while trying to cross. He was alone and lost most of his gear, including the camera he used to document his yearlong journey around the world-inspired by Into the Wild. Another solo hiker, from Australia, capsized trying to paddle across the river in a pack raft. He dislocated his shoulder but managed to swim to the other side, where he used the swift current to push the bone back into its socket, clutching willow branches on the river's bank to steady his body in the frigid water.

Ten miles past the Teklanika, the trail opens into a clearing where the bus sits at the edge of the woods, its old tires sinking into the ground. Some hikers hoot and holler at the sight of it when they arrive. Others pause, open-mouthed, and stare.

Once wild, the site now looks worn with use. Charred fire rings, bullet cartridges, and soda cans are scattered on the surrounding grass. Trash-an empty marshmallow bag here, half-burned toilet paper there-is littered about, though much is consolidated into old oil drums and garbage bags that overflow with wine bottles, ravioli cans, and spent bags of dehydrated backpacking meals.

Most windows on the bus are cracked or missing, covered by a few tarps that rattle in the breeze. Shards of broken glass are sprinkled on the ground. The bus's green-and-white paint job is fading back to school-bus yellow in places where spidering webs of rust haven't oxidized it to brown. Two parallel indentations in the frame mark a spot where a truck seems to have rammed the bus, perhaps in an attempt to knock it over. The "142" is freckled with bullet holes.

The door inside remains stiffly ajar, creaking when budged. Hay covers the floor. At the far end is the bed where McCandless's body was found. It's now covered with a sheet and a brown quilt. Behind folds of tarp, there's a plaque that Billie and Walt McCandless placed for their son in 1993, "commending his soul to the world." A pale blue suitcase they left rests atop a broken set of drawers across from the barrel stove.

Rope, bug spray, newspapers, blankets, Jack London and Leo Tolstoy paperback collections, emergency food, an inhaler, binoculars, a side-view mirror, candles, a handmade poster that reads "Happiness Road Only Real When Shared," and an Altoids tin are scattered in and around the drawers. The tin contains a message, written in Sharpie, addressed to Chris: "All I could think of to give you that would really be a part of me." Graffiti covers almost every square inch of the interior frame with names, dates, and a few quotes: "Live the life you always imagined," "Two roads diverged in the wood, and I chose the path less traveled," "Get busy living or get busy dying."

Most of the writing happens in the logbook, though. When Carine McCandless visited the bus in August 2007, she left a notebook with a quote on the cover: "There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way." She wrote that she hoped her brother's philosophy of simplicity and honesty would one day be more widespread.

The notebook now contains hundreds of entries. One begins, "Dear fellow dreamers." Another calls the bus "the wildest hostel of all." One man wrote that he walked here from Minnesota. A woman wrote that she'd been "a bitch" to her boyfriend right before he fell into the Teklanika on their way to visit the bus. She signed off asking for good luck because it was raining.

Enamored with the spot, many write that they could see why McCandless stayed. One man described his plans to call his parents for the first time in eight years, and another said he would propose to his significant other when he returned from the trail. Many say that McCandless's story is not about a man who died but about someone who truly lived. Some express gratitude to him, "for guiding our hearts to find our own paths," "for giving people hope," and for having the "guts and glory and faith to carry out his dreams."

MANY ALASKANS, OF COURSE, don't feel any reverence for McCandless at all. The debate about his worth is often harsh; locals like to float theories about his death wish, his alleged schizophrenia, and his outright foolishness.

The intensity of the debate was rekindled this past September, when Jon Krakauer wrote a story for The New Yorker 's website that revised his theory about how McCandless died. Krakauer argued that it happened because of a neurotoxin called ODAP, which is found in a plant that McCandless was eating and can cause lathyrism, a condition that leads to paralysis. Because the plant is widely considered edible, Krakauer declared that this finding confirms his long-held belief that McCandless wasn't "as clueless and incompetent as his detractors have made him out to be."

Plenty of commentary ensued, and plenty of it charged with controversy. "Raised by a game guide in AK my family has 'respect' for the land that is different than city kids from 'outside,'" wrote "kvalvik" in a comment on Krakauer's article. "Respect for the land comes to mean it will kill you as fast as a slow rabbit in front of a fast fox."

Few have been as scathingly critical of McCandless's sympathizers as Craig Medred, an Alaskan who has written numerous pieces about him over the years. In the Alaska Dispatch this fall, Medred, responding to Krakauer's article, noted the irony of "self-involved urban Americans, people more detached from nature than any society of humans in history, worshipping the noble, suicidal narcissist, the bum, thief and poacher Chris McCandless."

The pilgrims often encounter similar disdain. I know of beer-toting locals on ATVs who falsely warned three hikers from Phoenix that a "forest fire" was burning between the Teklanika and the bus, urging them to turn back. A pair of hikers I met told me about their experience buying the film's soundtrack at the Anchorage Barnes and Noble, where one man told them that the bus had been removed. When they went to the Backcountry Information Center at Denali National Park to ask questions about the hike, a ranger told them it wasn't her job to tell them where the bus was, and that if they didn't know, they had no business being out there. She said she would end up pulling their bodies out of the river.

Much of the polarization surrounding McCandless stems from a divide in people's beliefs about what justifies risk-taking in the backcountry. In Alaska, it's generally considered acceptable to invite risk while making a living on the land-fishing, hunting, logging, mushing, trapping. It is less acceptable to take chances in search of a more philosophical way of life.

The trooper I had spoken with about the rescue of the Grand Hotel employees complained to me that people heading into the wilderness for purposes of self-discovery can be driven in a way that makes them do stupid things, such as disregarding the weather.

"It's different if you have a trapline and that's how you make your living," he said. "Those guys live out there. They have to go out when it's 40 or 50 below."

Part of what infuriates many about McCandless was the fact that he intentionally made his trip more dangerous than it had to be-bringing only rice for food, leaving behind a topographical map and compass. He sought a wilderness like the one Wallace Stegner described as "the challenge against which our character as a people was formed." Most folks around Healy, the town four miles south of the Stampede Road turnoff, prefer to wander the woods by all-terrain vehicles. It's faster.

The topic of McCandless and the pilgrims came up at a potluck I attended in September. When the name came up, the people in the room, who had so recently been jolly over the halibut and beer, became angry, their voices rising as many shouted and swore over each other.

"Why don't they just read A Walk in the Woods?" said Andrew Pace, a flannel-clad dog musher who lives on Stampede Road and works in Denali National Park.

The guests rattled off names of Alaskans who had homesteaded remote areas of the state. "There are so many success stories," Pace said. "It just makes me mad that one about a failure is so famous."

FOR A STORY ABOUT A young man who wanted to spend more time outside, many of its most obsessive fans spend a great deal of time inside and online. Numerous forums and Facebook pages contain thousands of posts and dozens of full-length essays about McCandless. There is the Christopher McCandless forum, the Stampede Trail information site and various Into the Wild Facebook pages. Followers number in the millions.

Fans have asked each other whether to stay put or travel, whether the scene in the movie in which Emile Hirsch looks at the camera is symbolic or not, whether the Internet would have made McCandless more prepared or more angry. One asked how to get the same glasses Hirsch wore in the movie. Some share pictures of their Bus 142 tattoos, their homemade pendants, and their Lego-and-duct-tape models.

Steve Salmon, a 40-year-old from New Jersey with a graying goatee and stocky gait, was so involved with the forums at one time that he said it was like having a full-time job. We walked to the bus together this August. Salmon had made the Lego-and-duct-tape models, and he'd purchased back issues of The New Yorker and People magazines on eBay with the original articles about McCandless's death. Before we hit the trail and lost service, he texted from the side of Stampede Road, flashing his iPhone at me to show me a new text message.

"That's my friend Carine," he said, smiling.

Another fan, Mike Kramer, 41, has lived in Kentucky, mostly mowing lawns, for the past eight years. The most recent three of those years he spent living in a tent. He calls himself homeless by choice, and says that if he wrote a book, he would call it 365 Days on a Hill Next to Walmart.

A few years ago, Kramer rented the movie Into the Wild never having heard of it. The next day he read the book. The day after that, he bought a ticket to Alaska to go see the bus. Before leaving, he got in touch with Erik Halfacre, asking for advice about the trail. He had no experience in the backcountry, but like many others, he decided it required more determination than expertise.

Halfacre, who lives in Anchorage, created a website devoted to hiking the Stampede Trail. Pilgrims use it to coordinate group hikes to the bus and exchange advice about the trip. When Carine needed a hiker to bring another logbook to the bus, Halfacre put her in touch with Kramer. She called him one night and introduced herself, leaving Kramer stupefied. He describes her as the closest thing to a celebrity he knows.

To date, Kramer has been to the bus three times. His second trip was in March 2011. He spent 16 days on the trail. The temperature reached 30-below, and he suffered frostbite on his thumb. Instead of melting snow for water, he sprinkled Kool-Aid packets onto handfuls of snow and ate them frozen. He spent most of his time collecting wood to keep the fire in the bus's barrel stove going. The troopers checked on him twice. When they asked if he had enough gear, he said he had an extra pair of blue jeans. During one of these visits, a trooper told Kramer he didn't want to die carrying Kramer's dead body out.

This fall, I met Carine McCandless in New York City, where she was visiting from her Virginia home to give a lecture at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx. She has long brown hair and a wide smile. She wore jeans and a red top, and spoke with a full and kind voice.

Carine, 42, estimates that she still receives 30 messages a day from people who've been affected by her brother's story. She answers each e-mail personally. She writes at the desk Chris used in high school and sometimes carries a rock she picked up on her visit to the bus in her jeans pocket. Many high schools have incorporated Into the Wild into their curricula, and she sometimes visits the schools to give talks.

A now iconic photo of Fairbanks 142 serves as the header for her website, a picture of her standing between Jon Krakauer and Sean Penn at the Los Angeles film premiere is on the home page, and a note declaring her determination "to continue to be his voice and carry on his message" is also on the site.

"I think Chris would find it remarkable that people find him so remarkable," she told me, adding that Chris was genuinely mystified as to why more people didn't simply take off like he did.

Since his death, McCandless's family has been actively involved with the community of seekers. In 2011, his parents, Billie and Walt, published Back to the Wild: The Photographs and Writings of Christopher McCandless. The 241-page book contains photos he took during his travels, from Detrital Wash, Arizona, to South Dakota to Bus 142, with captions written by Walt.

Carine created a public Facebook page called "Carine McCandless Into the Wild." She wrote a letter on it, detailing her feeling of responsibility to speak for Chris, since he could no longer speak for himself. She described some of the domestic violence she and Chris experienced as children, writing about their father's "gin-induced rages," in which he told them he was God. She criticized her parents' publication of Back to the Wild, calling it an attempt to "take advantage of vague portrayals of our history with their efforts to create a new one." She described her intention with the page as offering an emphatically true connection to Chris.

And while she still lives in the same town as her parents, she said she sees them so little that one of her daughters wouldn't be able to recognize them if she saw them in the street.

A link to this message was posted on the Facebook page "Back to the Wild-the new book of Christopher McCandless." Joseph Moss, who was the photo editor and designer for the project, commented and accused Carine of airing her family's dirty laundry to the public. He said the story is not just for the McCandless family; after Into the Wild, it became a story "for all of us." Many responded, including Carine. She wrote that her parents "continue to bully him in his death." She asked Moss to come to her house to see unpublished letters from her brother if he didn't believe her accounts of the abuse they and their other siblings experienced.

Alaskans don't feel the same reverence... One noted the irony of "self-involved urban Americans, people more detached from nature than any society of humans in history, worshipping the noble, suicidal narcissist, the bum, thief and poacher Chris McCandless."

Back to the Wild came up when Carine was fielding questions from starry-eyed students after her Riverdale lecture. Afterward, I asked what upset her about the new book.

"They say that they're not lying, but when you're presenting our family as some perfect Christian family, it's not the full picture," she said. "The first sentence on the e-book is something about how we can only imagine why a young man would set off and sever ties with his family and friends. But they knew why he left."

Carine is coming out with a memoir, The Wild Truth, about her brother and family next year, in what she called an attempt to "tell the whole story." In a description of the book, she wrote that she and her half-siblings have come together since Chris's death and found absolution, as she believes Chris found in the wild before he died.

At the end of her Riverdale lecture, she showed a picture of the note that McCandless left when he died, writing in block letters that he had had a happy life and thanked the Lord. She then asked the students how they wanted to feel in their final days.

"It's tragic my brother died young. But because of the trails he had chosen, he died at peace. Isn't that the best that any of us can hope for?"

Many of the students thought so. A few have started fantasizing about taking trips to Alaska to visit the bus. One senior asked me if there was any program that could take you. Another told me she was planning a trip for the first week of March.

DURING MY TIME ON the trail, I met a pair of French cyclists, three middle-aged engineers from Arizona, three Spanish travelers (on their way to work on marijuana farms in Washington), an Italian trekker, and a backpacker from Georgia who travels, train hops included, with a kitten perched on his shoulder. One fan from Minnesota flew out to Alaska, walked the 40 miles round-trip in one day, then drove straight back to the airport.

Jedidiah White, 25, from Missouri, read Into the Wild shortly after breaking up with a longtime girlfriend and deciding not to go to medical school. He wasn't sure where to turn, and the story provided a direction. He began planning a 22-day trip floating the Teklanika from inside Denali National Park to visit the bus. He had little experience outdoors, and he set out for the bus schlepping 70 pounds of gear, including an iron skillet, a knife sharpener, and two rafts. On the second day of his trip, he flipped his boat in some rapids. His gear got wet, his raft tore, and he had to walk the rest of the way to the bus. But the experience "opened the gate," he told me. Before the trip, he wanted to be a doctor and make a lot of money; now he wants to open a winery and spend more time outside. He's been to the bus once more since, and he's planning a six-week trip in the Stampede Corridor next summer.

Darren Storsley, 39, from Vancouver, assigns Into the Wild every year to his high school psychology class. He says it's the best textbook he knows, and he confesses that he spent the better part of the time during his visit to the bus weeping.

A couple of weeks before walking the trail this past summer, Storsley picked up a hitchhiker at a gas station near Talkeetna. The tall and lanky backpacker, Mark McMillan, took up temporary residence in the passenger seat of Storsley's Chevy Blazer as they road-tripped around Alaska. When I met them on the trail, they introduced themselves as "soul brothers." They had driven all the way up to Prudhoe Bay, jumped in the Arctic Ocean, and discovered that McCandless was a shared hero.

"Here's someone who heard the sermon of the world and didn't like it," Storsley said of McCandless as he leaned against his backpack on the trail. "Here's someone who preached for himself instead. Just imagine if we all did that.

"I'm jealous," Storsley went on. "He was braver than I am. I think I live according to my own values, but I'm still in society. I still have a job, I still make money. I go to work ten months out of the year, and I play for the other two. I'm still in the box. I'm not strapped to it, but I'm still in it. And he had the courage to step away from it."

McMillan sat against his backpack, munching M&M's. He's a McCandless look-alike-curly brown hair and a scruffy beard-but about a foot taller. He used to keep the Into the Wild movie open on his laptop, watching ten-minute segments of it before doing homework. He's always loved spending time outside. As a kid, he memorized the names of birds found in Southern California, paid for a membership to the National Wildlife Federation by selling homemade bread out of a wagon, and eventually headed into the woods to backpack, mountain-bike, and climb alone.

During his graduation ceremony at Walla Walla University, in southeastern Washington, he sat with his family at a Thai restaurant and told them that, while he loved them very much, they might not hear from him for the next five years. His plan at the time was to spend the rest of the summer pack-rafting down a 400-mile river in the Brooks Range with an edible-plant book, a fishing pole, and 40 servings of freeze-dried broccoli.

McCandless's story, he explained to me, had helped him see the possibility of a life in which adventure was the norm, not the exception. His recent release from college meant he was free to pursue such a life.

"The bus is where McCandless's journey ended," McMillan said, "and the rest of ours begins." O

Diana Saverin is the founder of the travel and adventure blog These Fifty States. This is her first story for Outside.

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Every year, scores of Into the Wild fans tackle a dangerous river crossing to visit the last home of Alaska's most famous adventure casualty. Why are so many people willing to risk injury, and even death, to pay homage to a controversial ascetic who perished so young?

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McCandless's Sisters Return to AK - (ABC News 2014)

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McCandless's Sisters Return to AK - (ABC News 2014)

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Chris McCandless' Sisters Return to His Alaskan Home