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Dying in the wild (published Sept. 1992)

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Dying in the wild (published Sept. 1992)

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The article that prompted Jon Krakauer to write the article and subsequently the book: Into the Wild

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The hiker had kept his diary on the blank pages of a paperback book entitled "Tanaina Plantlore," which tells how the Athabaskan Indians used plants for food and medicine.

In all, the diary bears 113 entries, some just a word or two. All but one starts with only a number, but the 100th entry starts, "Day 100." That has led the authorities to believe that the hiker may have been stranded that long.

The only indication of how the hiker might have injured himself comes from the diary's second entry: "Fall through ice day." But the entry does not describe any injury.

The diary suggests that the man often left the bus to pick berries and hunt game with a .22-caliber rifle. Entry No. 27 says, "Climb Mountain." 'Misery'

But the ninth entry says "weakness," and the 14th "misery." And the 69th entry includes the words "lonely, scared."

Entry 43 starts with "MOOSE," written in capital letters and underlined twice. Subsequent entries tell how the man cut the animal up and tried without success to smoke the meat to preserve it.

"Maggots already!" entry 48 begins. "Smoking appears ineffective. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life."

For "Day 100" the hiker wrote: "Made it! But in weakest condition of life. Death looms as serious threat, too weak to walk out, have literally become trapped in the wild -- no game."

The final entry is No. 113. It bears only that number, with nothing after it.

Only seven miles from the bus was a cabin used by park rangers on patrol. John Quinley, a spokesman for the National Park Service, said the hiker would have been far better off had he come upon it.

"In the late spring and summer, there isn't a regular schedule" of patrols, Mr. Quinley said. "But there would be food, a stove and bedding there."

One of the two notes found in the bus was addressed to anyone who might come by while the hiker was out looking for food.

"SOS," the note said. "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."

State troopers say this note bore the name that may be that of the hiker, followed by an entry that said, "August?"

The other note said: "I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!"

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Dying in the Wild, a Hiker Recorded the Terror

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The hiker had kept his diary on the blank pages of a paperback book entitled "Tanaina Plantlore," which tells how the Athabaskan Indians used plants for food and medicine. In all, the diary bears 113 entries, some just a word or two. All but one starts with only a number, but the 100th entry starts, "Day 100."

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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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Does 'The Wild Truth' Tell the True Story of Chris McCandless?

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Does 'The Wild Truth' Tell the True Story of Chris McCandless?

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The Wild Truth, the new memoir by Carine McCandless, is rough going at times. The book covers many years and a lot of ground, and much of it is emotionally powerful in a positive way, including new details that Carine offers about what the late Christopher McCandless was like as a brother. (Short answer: loving and protective.) But this family history features a startling amount of toxic behavior, most of it coming from Carine's and Chris's parents, Walt and Billie McCandless. Carine describes them as a pair who, at their best, were good providers and fun, caring people. But at their worst, she writes, they were cruel and abusive, and this side of them was on display all too frequently when the kids were growing up in El Segundo, California, and, later, Annandale, Virginia.

According to Carine, Walt was a violent bully who drank heavily and sometimes flew into rages that ended with whippings and beatings for his wife and children. Billie was the primary victim, Carine writes, but she was also a victimizer, belittling and betraying both kids at crucial junctures. A vivid example occurred a week after Carine graduated from high school in 1989, when she came home from a date just before a household curfew. Walt, she writes, was waiting for her at the door, intoxicated, and he jerked her violently into the house.

"My feet crossed over the threshold without touching it," she writes, "my sandals falling to the floor as he lifted me by the neck and shoulders, repeatedly slamming me against the wall. A deep, fierce roar escaped him as he threw me onto the couch and trapped me under his weight." Walt soon let Carine go, but not before putting his hands around her throat and calling her a "fucking bitch." Billie was away that night, at a family beach house in Maryland. Carine says that when she got Billie on the phone and told her what had happened, her mother said: "You know what, Carine? I think you're a lying bitch."

The book also explores in great detail another McCandless family drama: the fact that Chris and Carine were illegitimate. In the early 1960s, when Walt was working at Hughes Aircraft in southern California, he was married to a woman named Marcia, with whom he eventually had six children. Billie worked at Hughes as a secretary, and she and Walt began having an affair. For years, Walt kept two households: one for Marcia and her kids, one for Billie, Chris, and Carine. Chris was born to Billie in 1968, only three months after Marcia had given birth to a fifth child, a boy named Shannon. Quinn McCandless, Walt and Marcia's sixth child, was born in 1969. Carine, the youngest of Walt's eight children, was born to Billie in 1971. Walt and Billie finally married a few years after Marcia divorced Walt in 1972.

This second family proved to be a godsend for Carine over the long haul-she's close with them still-but the legacy of abuse and deception weighed heavily on Chris, and one of the driving points of The Wild Truth is that his famous, ultimately fatal journey of adventure and discovery was motivated in large part by a desire to escape his parents, a theme that will be familiar to anyone who saw Sean Penn's film version of Into the Wild, released in 2007. But Carine's new book fleshes out the causes of Chris's actions with much more detail and impact. "People think they understand our story because they know how his ended," she writes, "but they don't know how it all began."

Finally, the book includes another fascinating piece of backstory, unknown until now: Carine told Jon Krakauer, author of 1996's best selling Into the Wild, about Walt and Billie's flaws when he was researching his book. At the time, Carine wasn't ready to go public with this information, and she asked Krakauer to keep that part of the story private. In a foreword to The Wild Truth, he says that honoring this promise was no problem-journalists keep information off the record all the time. In addition, he writes: "I shared Carine's desire to avoid causing undue pain to Walt, Billie, and Carine's siblings from Walt's first marriage."

Krakauer also thought people would be able to grasp, from "indirect clues" in his narrative, that Chris's behavior during his final years was explained by "the volatile dynamics" of his upbringing.

"Many readers did understand this, as it turned out," Krakauer writes. "But many did not. A lot of people came away from reading Into the Wild without grasping why Chris did what he did. Lacking explicit facts, they concluded that he was merely self-absorbed, unforgivably cruel to his parents, mentally ill, suicidal, and/or witless."

The Wild Truth will be published on November 11, and what remains to be seen is how Walt and Billie respond to a work that purports to lay everything bare and could be extremely damaging to their reputations. They have made only one blanket public statement so far, in response to a request from ABC's 20/20 that they comment for a segment about The Wild Truth that aired on November 7.

"After a brief review of its contents and intention, we concluded that this fictionalized writing has absolutely nothing to do with our beloved son, Chris, or his character," they wrote. "The whole unfortunate event in Chris's life 22 years ago is about Chris and his dreams-not a spiteful, hyped up, attention-getting story about his family." Walt and Billie declined a request from Outside to comment further on the book.

In advance of The Wild Truth's release, Carine McCandless spoke with Outside editorial director Alex Heard about the what, why, and why now of a memoir that seems destined to arrive with a bang.

OUTSIDE: Readers will be shocked by the abuse you describe in the book, which is very frightening. What was it like living with this, and why did you decide it was time to tell people what really happened?
CARINE: My hope is that this new information about a very well-known story is going to be helpful to people, and eye-opening. I want to empower others who face tough circumstances, specifically domestic violence. My point was not to villainize my parents in any way, shape, or form. People don't learn from villains. My point is to humanize them, so that people can learn from the situation.

I don't like to use the word "expose." This is just the truth, the information, the answers to all the "why" questions that have been lingering about why Chris felt the way he did, why he left the way he did, and what pushed him to the extreme.

What kind of reactions are you getting from your extended family-the sons and daughters that Walt had with Marcia?
It's important to acknowledge that, while all my siblings were supportive of me and gave me their trust and respect for why I felt I needed to do this, there were a couple who wished I wasn't doing it. Because it's tough having your family in the public eye so much, and then being thrust into it again. I really want it to be clear how much I worked, in the writing of this, to respect my family's space and their comfort level. I worked very hard not to speak for anyone who chose not to have their voice directly present outside of the facts, including my siblings, and I also was careful not to speak for Chris, unless it's something he directly said to me or wrote to me in a letter.

There are three different episodes in the book in which Chris, you, and you and Marcia's kids together try to confront Walt and Billie-either by letter, e-mail, or in person-and have a healthy, if confrontational, discussion about their behavior and why you think it needs to change. Every time, they give a sort of flippant, dismissive response, which doesn't indicate that they see much need to self-assess. Have they read the book, and do you have any sense yet of how they're reacting?
My parents were sent a copy of the book ahead of time, because I did want to allow them, with all due respect, the opportunity to respond however they wished to. And I didn't want them to be blindsided, you know, by the media or in an e-mail.

Have you heard anything about how they're taking it?
Nothing has come directly to me. I don't want to speak for Walt and Billie, but I'll just tell you what I personally expect. I think their history has shown that denial would be very likely. My mother has told me in the past that, because of her and my dad's religious beliefs, the slate has been wiped clean, and that the events of our past just don't matter anymore-they're non-existent. But I believe honesty is imperative in the process of healing from family turmoil and tragedy. In the book, I write of having raw and selfish optimism, holding out a slight hope that removing the final masks from my parents might bring upon them some relief and allow some healing within my family. This is certainly not my expectation, but again, I want to be respectful and not speak for them.

And, obviously, you can't try to predict what they'll do.
I don't expect it to be a pleasant situation. But over the years, I've really come to feel that I did a disservice to Chris and my extended family-maybe even to my parents-by allowing these things to be buried and to manifest as misconceptions about Chris.

I also want to make it clear that I have the highest respect for Jon Krakauer, who did a remarkable job writing Into the Wild. I realized when I was writing my book what a difficult task I put on him when I shared a lot of the struggles and details about the family dysfunction in order for him to better understand Chris. But I made him promise-before I let him read Chris's letters, before I told him these things-that he wouldn't expose any of it in the book. He had such high integrity in doing that, and I admire him for it.

A key moment in your memoir comes around the time of Chris's graduation from Emory University in 1990. He tells you he's going to allow your parents to fool themselves into believing that their dysfunctional relationship with him is stabilizing. But then he tells you what he really has in mind, in a letter that you're sharing for the first time in your book: "I'm going to completely knock them out of my life ... I'm going to divorce them as my parents." And you make it clear that, when Chris set a course like that, he stuck with it.
Yes, that's right.

You also emphasize that Chris had a sense of adventure at a very young age, a love of nature, and that he was drawn to Alaska by the books he liked as a boy. Have you ever thought about whether-without the catalyst of him wanting to get away from your parents-he would have gone off wandering anyway?
I think Chris would have been an adventurer and drawn to nature no matter what. I think it was just innate. There are a lot of people who go off and do extreme adventures, but the difference is that they let someone know where they're going.

Chris was a smart and reasonable young man, but he was also a young man. From conversations I've had with Jon, I know that he, his friends, and fellow mountaineers remember when they were young and how many times they came out of a situation where they nearly didn't make it out alive. It might seem reckless to them now, when they're older, wiser, and more experienced. But at the time their boldness could be blinding, or perhaps that was the point.

Because of Chris's childhood situation, he felt this need to push himself to extremes and prove something. Things came pretty easily to Chris-and by that I mean he was smart and he was good at everything he tried to do-so he had to up the ante a bit and make things harder. Chris believed firmly that if you knew exactly how the adventure was going to turn out, it wasn't really an adventure. He understood the risks he was taking, and they were calculated, and there was a reason for it.

But to answer the crux of your question: People ask me all the time if I blame Walt and Billie for Chris's death. I don't. Chris made certain decisions and placed himself in that perilous situation. He also accepted responsibility for his mistakes, and accepted his fate bravely at the end. I do, however, hold Walt and Billie accountable for Chris's disappearance and for us not knowing where he was. That was absolutely related to his feeling a need to escape and disconnect.

Your decision to write the book was a long time coming, and you've indicated that it stemmed from years of watching Walt and Billie self-interpret events to their benefit. You offer a particularly telling scene. It's the morning after Chris's wake in Virginia, during a breakfast at your parents' home, and your mother says, "Everyone was so kind and forgiving of Chris for what he's done to this family." That must have been-
Yeah, I remember that morning! I was in this haze of not even being able to fathom that Chris was gone. And I'm balancing my anger with why I know that he left, in the way that he did, and why we didn't know where he was. I'm struggling with that anger, along with the empathy my parents deserve for having lost their son.

Chris was not just some insolent teen rebel who had nothing to complain about and took off, and I didn't write this book in defense of him. But what really made it difficult for me to continue to allow the unspoken to remain unspoken was that, with that information not being out there, it gave my parents the opportunity to almost bury themselves. I saw it coming and I warned them many times, when they would do outreach and were speaking about Chris and portraying themselves as martyrs who were honoring him, no matter how much he had hurt them.

I begged them many times, "Please, you need to stop doing that." In reply, they kind of used Jon's book as a bible: "It's not in here, so it didn't happen, Carine. We don't know what you're talking about." And that angered me very much, because I had protected them in that book.

Meanwhile, Jon was keeping his mouth shut and I was keeping my mouth shut, and I kept waiting for my parents to learn a lesson. And while I'm waiting, I'm keeping the rest of that lesson from millions of people around the world who are learning about this story.

What made you finally decide "now"?
It came full circle for me when I started speaking with students. In places where Into the Wild was required reading, I saw what an amazing effect it had on them, and I became more and more comfortable answering their questions. I would always answer the students honestly, and I just started giving out more information. Then I would receive letters from professors, saying, "Your visit here has changed the way I'm teaching this book." Or when I talked to some student who I just knew was dealing with violence at home, or I could tell they were going through some abusive situation. To hear so many times how these young people finally reached out for help, for the first time, I knew I had to tell this story.

On that score, the book is not just about Chris and your parents and Into the Wild. A lot of it is about you, as an adult survivor of domestic violence and emotional trauma.
Yes, and I want people to understand that, because my intent is not to retell Into the Wild. There will be people who don't understand why I'm talking about having kids and failed marriages and having a special-needs child with Down syndrome, when they just want to know about Chris.

The book is about Chris, but it's more of a survival story. The best way I can help people learn from Chris and our experiences and our childhood is to show them directly how I learned from Chris and how I learned from our family's dysfunction, how I survived. So I utilize myself in both positive and self-deprecating ways. I can't criticize other people for not learning from mistakes if I don't acknowledge my own mistakes and what I learned. This book very much goes into all of that.

There's a moment when you and Chris are both little kids and you're walking to church. You're reminded of a waterfall you both saw during a family trip to the Shenandoah, and you recall Chris saying, "See, Carine? That's the purity of nature, it may be harsh in its honesty but it never lies to you."
Truth was so important to Chris, and I want people, when they turn the last page of this book, to feel empowered in knowing that all things that happen in life, both good and bad, have a purpose. Chris used to talk to me about how everything that happens brings with it an opportunity, and we used to talk about how even negative things that occur are fuel and you can use that energy-it's all energy, you're in charge of how it affects you, and you can use it to launch yourself in a positive direction. I think Chris saw nature as an escape from all the things that he was lacking in his childhood. Things might be harsh, and nature is sometimes harsh, but nature is not going to manipulate you.

Chris and I knew the good things that we had, just by virtue of being kids who grew up in America, but that didn't make the negative things any less real. I had to navigate my way through that, and it took me a long time, and I had to face that I couldn't navigate successfully without acknowledging the full truth. I know this book is going to be the beginning of a long, really tough process. I know I'll be heralded as brave by some and I'll be criticized as cruel by others. But I believe these lessons can help those who read them as much as it helped me to write them down. I wrote this book with a focus on truth and with pure intent. The person who taught me that this is the only thing that matters is Chris.

More Outside Coverage on Chris McCandless

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The Wild Truth , the new memoir by Carine McCandless, is rough going at times. The book covers many years and a lot of ground, and much of it is emotionally powerful in a positive way, including new details that Carine offers about what the late Christopher McCandless was like as a brother.

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Your DNA Does not Define you : Carine McCandless

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Your DNA Does not Define you : Carine McCandless

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Your DNA Does Not Define You | Carine McCandless | TEDxEmory

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Best-selling author Carine McCandless shares the power of bringing your life into focus and living your truth; lessons she learned from her brother, Chris McCandless, subject of the iconic book & movie Into the Wild. Carine McCandless is the author of the New York Times Bestseller The Wild Truth, a memoir of her life.

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

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A photo collage of events in Chris McCandless' life mixed to an acoustic song I composed and dedicated to the ideals and values he embodied. Although I've never met the man, I've been deeply touched by his spirit.

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Why are we still talking about Chris...?

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Why are we still talking about Chris...?

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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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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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A new paper presents hitherto unknown evidence that appears to close the book on the cause of Christopher McCandless's death...

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Should we stil care ( article Outdoor Magazine)

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Should we stil care ( article Outdoor Magazine)

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On May 2, Jon Krakauer came out with his latest treatise on the particulars of Chris McCandless' death almost 24 years ago. McCandless was the young man who wandered into the Alaska wilds with a .22-caliber rifle and a 10-pound bag of rice and lived there for more than 100 days, hunting and foraging, before he died at age 24 inside an abandoned bus. His journey was made famous in Krakauer's 1996 book, Into the Wild, which Sean Penn adapted as a film in 2007.

How exactly McCandless died has been debated since his story first surfaced. Krakauer first wrote about McCandless in a 1993 article for Outside, and he has been trying to nail down the precise details of McCandless' decline ever since-asserting himself in online comment threads, testing his hypotheses in science labs, and writing periodic feature-length revisions of his theories.

"The debate over what killed Chris McCandless, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering and occasionally flaring for more than two decades now," Krakauer wrote in the lead to his latest article, posted on Medium. (A version of the article is also included as an afterword in the newest edition of Into the Wild.) If you've been following Krakauer's work-he outlined his fifth theory in an article published last spring on NewYorker.com -you'll see that the new piece is more an overview of his research from the past two decades than a new proposition.

When Krakauer first tackled the question in his 1993 article, he wrote that McCandless had likely eaten poisonous seeds from a wild sweet pea, mistaking it for a wild potato seedpod he'd been safely eating for weeks. When Into the Wild came out a few years later, Krakauer changed his theory: McCandless had eaten seeds from the wild potato plant, and those seeds contained a toxic alkaloid called swainsonine. Additional testing later refuted that theory, and Krakauer continued trying to figure out what was wrong with those potato seeds. After all, one of McCandless' terse journal entries indicated the role the seeds had in his own demise: "EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT[ATO] SEED. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP. STARVING. GREAT JEOPARDY."

In 2007, Krakauer suggested that a toxic mold had grown on the seeds McCandless stored in a damp Ziploc. Then, in 2013, he wrote that wild potato seeds, which McCandless had been eating, contained ODAP, a neurotoxin that could cause paralysis in malnourished young men. Krakauer's most recent revision replaced ODAP with a similar amino acid called L-canavanine, which was present in the seeds and apparently toxic enough to do McCandless in. Krakauer also co-authored a paper, "Presence of L-canavanine in Hedysarum Alpinum Seeds and Its Potential Role in the Death of Chris McCandless," published in the peer-reviewed journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine in March 2015.

I've sometimes puzzled at Krakauer's desire to figure out what exactly happened in that bus so many years ago. It is, after all, his style to relentlessly pore over facts and straighten them out when necessary, as he did in a postscript to another of his books, Into Thin Air, in 1999. But with the seeds, I couldn't help but wonder whether these are all just different ways of saying that McCandless starved.

Some Outside readers have expressed bewilderment at the continued coverage of the subject, too. (One Facebook comment: "Seriously who gives a shit about this anymore? Move on.") In his latest New Yorker article, Krakauer justified his persistence, writing that "because many people-both admirers of McCandless and his detractors-regard Into the Wild as a cautionary tale, it's important to know as much as possible about how McCandless actually may have died." The question remains: Does knowing the precise circumstances of the young man's death fundamentally change the way we read and understand his story?

The botanical update does not fundamentally alter the story for those already convinced that McCandless was brave and adventurous rather than naive and dumb, unless they're planning their own foraging foray in the Alaska bush. The theory does equip these fans with more factual ammunition in their fight to prove their hero's worth in the ongoing debate about McCandless, which has unfolded largely online. Many of the most outspoken fans have various Facebook pages and Internet forums, where they post pictures of Bus 142 tattoos, pendants, and Lego models, among other tributes. Followers number in the millions.

On the other side of the debate are people who believe that McCandless was a foolhardy greenhorn who died because he was unprepared for the northern wilds. Many of these detractors are Alaskan. I met some of them while living in Healy, the town nearest to the bus where McCandless died, where I was working on a story for Outside about the so-called pilgrims who hike out to that bus. Just mentioning McCandless' name quickly reveals that the rage these detractors feel hasn't faded. The famous "142" on the bus is so shot up with bullet holes that it's now illegible.

Perhaps no one is a more prolific voice for the anti-McCandless camp than Alaska Dispatch News columnist Craig Medred. He has written articles arguing that McCandless was schizophrenic and an "ignorant city kid." He has pointed out how richly ironic it is "to think of some 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."

Should Krakauer's latest theory challenge these critics' beliefs and rebuke their claim that McCandless was an idiot? Krakauer thinks so. In his 2013 article, he wrote that the neurotoxin theory "validates my conviction that McCandless wasn't as clueless and incompetent as his detractors have made him out to be."

Regardless of the precise circumstances of his death, McCandless was undertaking a risky endeavor when he died. He did not attempt his "Alaskan odyssey" in the Boy Scout way. He wandered into the backcountry without a topographical map or enough food to keep himself alive for an extended stay. He left himself with no backup plan or safety net, and so, when things went wrong, he had no way out.

If people object to this kind of risk taking in the woods, there is no reason why any of Krakauer's theories, new or old, about McCandless' death should change their thinking. Under such a view, McCandless was doing wrong the moment he stepped onto the Stampede Trail. Whether he survived wouldn't change the view that he was on a fool's mission and that he had packed foolishly for it.

But lots of people, including McCandless' detractors, take risks in the backcountry and have had close calls along the way without receiving the kind of scorn McCandless does. During one of Medred's backcountry exploits, for instance, he had to survive for ten days in Alaska without any food. Most McCandless-hating Alaskans I've spoken with reflexively respond to any mention of Into the Wild by listing people who are tougher and more skilled than McCandless-people who took risks but lived to tell their tale. These critics bemoan the fact that McCandless' death made him famous while others who survived haven't received the same fanfare.

This subset of readers who approve of some level of danger in the backcountry but disapprove of McCandless' journey is the subset whose interpretation of the story is due for revision if Krakauer's theory holds. These readers don't dismiss McCandless' intention-spending time in the wilderness-as invalid or stupid. Rather, they reject his endeavor because of the consequence it led to: his death.

If we accept Krakauer's theory, however, that means that McCandless' death was a fluke. It means McCandless didn't die because of some obvious mistake he made while in the woods or an overestimation of his skills. It means he may have simply run into serious bad luck. He would have had to know more than his field guide, Tanaina Plantlore, to know about the neurotoxin he had ingested. The seeds he ate came from a plant the guide describes as edible.

So, will the latest update quiet McCandless critics, or at least complicate their view of the story? It's doubtful.

At the end of Into the Wild, Krakauer describes a trip he took to the bus with Roman Dial, Alaska's backcountry guru, among others. As the group sat around the campfire one night talking about McCandless, Krakauer pointed out some of the dumb mistakes that could have easily been avoided and would have prevented the young man's death. Dial responded by defending McCandless, saying how difficult it is to live completely off the land in interior Alaska in the way McCandless did for several months. From Dial:

I guess I can't help identifying with the guy. I hate to admit it, but not so many years ago it could easily have been me in the same kind of predicament. When I first started coming to Alaska, I think I was probably a lot like McCandless: just as green, just as eager. And I'm sure there are plenty of other Alaskans who had a lot in common with McCandless when they first got here, too, including many of his critics. Which is maybe why they're so hard on him. Maybe McCandless reminds them a little too much of their former selves.

Krakauer's new theory may help people relate to McCandless' story by showing that his fate was a fluke. It nullifies the argument that McCandless got what he deserved or had it coming all along. Instead, it suggests that if McCandless had just a bit more luck, he might have survived.

Lead Photo: Diana Saverin

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Should We Still Care About Chris McCandless?

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On May 2, Jon Krakauer came out with his latest treatise on the particulars of Chris McCandless' death almost 24 years ago. McCandless was the young man who wandered into the Alaska wilds with a .22-caliber rifle and a 10-pound bag of rice and lived there for more than 100 days, hunting and foraging, before he died at age 24 inside an abandoned bus.

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The obsession ( article outdoor Magazine)

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The obsession ( article outdoor 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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Jon Krakauer interview on "Into the Wild" (1996)

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Journalist Jon Krakauer shares his new biography, "Into the Wild," which recounts the story of Chris McCandless who left everything behind, walked into the Alaskan wilderness, and tragically perished. ""﴿───► See more on the Authors Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIZqvqbtz9I30kDK7RrKXxtLK9WxA33-T Check out the Patreon rewards! https://www.patreon.com/ManufacturingIntellect

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Into the Wild study guide contains a biography of author Jon Krakauer, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Into the Wild: Into the Wild Book Summary & Study Guide | CliffsNotes

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Get free homework help on Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild: book summary, chapter summary and analysis, quotes, essays, and character analysis courtesy of CliffsNotes. Get free homework help on Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild: book summary, chapter summary and analysis, quotes, essays, and character analysis courtesy of CliffsNotes.

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From a general summary to chapter summaries to explanations of famous quotes, the SparkNotes Into the Wild Study Guide has everything you need to ace quizzes, tests, and essays.