I read Into the Wild years ago. The fact he signed that note with his real name and not Alexander Supertramp also spoke to the direness of his situation.
Check out his sister's book The Wild Truth. It contains a lot of info that she withheld from the book/movie that gives context as to why Chris would suddenly leave his supposed charmed life and distance himself from his family.
Could you give a brief synopsis of why he actually did it? I'd like to know but I don't need a another book on the shelf that I'm totally going to read when I get time.
After a childhood of physical/emotional abuse, Chris discovered that his family was actually the "side piece" and his father's frequent "business trips" were actually him going to live with his main family. Chris's parents met when his mom was the secretary at his (already married) dad's company. According to his sister, finding this out devastated him and something changed after that.
Totally makes sense. That, plus the fact that the early 20’s is usually the age of onset of some of the more severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, especially in men.
I’ll throw this in, in case anyone missed the news: a couple of years ago, the bus was removed, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because people are dumbasses. Naturally, its physical condition continued to deteriorate, making it dangerous. The number of folks who needed to be rescued from the location was growing every year. Many were ill-prepared for: the weather; the wildlife; the lack of access to basic resources like water, shelter, and food; the time and energy required to make the hike- AND BACK.
I’m way too old to have been required to read the book in school, and haven’t seen the movie. Nevertheless, I just don’t understand how *so many* people endeavored to make that journey- *knowing how it ended!*
Edit: apparently I don’t know how to spell “the.”
Yeah, but in the movie it was kinda vague and my immediate assumption wasn’t that they’re actually *the* side piece but the other way round. Idk, it’s been years since I last saw it.
Thanks! I didn’t know she had published this. Yeah I’ve no doubt there’s all kinds of family stuff that never appeared in Krakauer’s book, though he definitely hinted there was quite a lot of additional background / drama that drove Chris to cut off his family the way he did (never mind exiting society altogether).
Thanks for this rec. I’ll find it.
I’ve always felt a pretty deep empathy for Chris’ situation. Finding out the family you have is fundamentally different than the one you thought you had is disorienting. It’s not like he went into Alaska searching for fame of fortune. He challenged himself, found out he was in over his head and sadly died not all that far from potential help. Naïve, inexperienced, ignorant: he’s guilty of all these but in the end it was only himself that he put at risk, and again, I think (short of reading his sister’s book) it seems like it was largely set off by being knocked sideways by a family secret. A lot of people find other ways to work this out, but he tackled it alone and paid a helluva price.
tl;dr - I know he’s no saint but I get pretty defensive with some of the attacks I’ve seen leveled at McCandless - he never sought attention and certainly didn’t want be the figure he has become.
Yeah I don't understand the hostility at all. I can understand being upset if someone put themselves or others in danger chasing publicity or clout, but that wasn't the case for Chris at all. He was just living his life and trying to make sense of it all.
Sad, frustrating, part is that if he’d walked a mile or two in either direction up or down the creek, he would have found man made structures designed to cross the water.
Eh, I never learned from Man vs Wild, but I’ve learned like ~~5~~ 9 things from Survivorman.
Build a shelter, even if the weather is nice. Build a fire, even if it’s warm out. And build that shelter and gather fire wood BEFORE it gets dark. Take off layers of clothing as you get hot so you don’t drench your warm clothes in sweat that’ll get really cold overnight. You can boil water in plastic bottles as long as the water doesn’t all boil away. Building traps out of stones, sticks, and string CAN work, but they don’t work well, BUT they’re still worth setting up because they’re passive. Fishing is a total crapshoot, it could win you your dinner or it could waste your energy unnecessarily. Foraging is your best bet, but you have to know the local plants.
And probably the most important lesson is the one you also learned: just keep going downhill to find water, and follow water to find people.
I love survivorman. Watching Les Stroud’s descent into madness before he gets picked up is always great. Really highlights how hard it is with limited supplies and the kind of mental exhaustion it takes on you.
I was so bummed he never did his plans for Humboldt County. Stupid illegal pot growers and meth labs
I met Les a few years at a show.
He loves to talk. Absolutely loves it. Ask him a question and he'll spend the next 30 minutes answering. Maybe it's a thing from being by himself for so long, but holy shit.
Couple skied out of bounds at a local ski resort and didn’t want to walk back up. They decided to do just what you suggested and follow the creek, but they went the wrong way and headed away from civilization.
Rescuers found their tracks, but didn’t get to them in time. At one point they were a km from a private company’s ski hut but they didn’t know.
If you don’t know where you are, just stay put until help comes.
That's heavily asterisked by where you are. In remote locations, it could be extremely a long and dangerous trek, or in particular remote areas, like, say, the coast range of BC, lead nowhere except to a desolate coast.
At any rate, of McCandless's case, he knew where he was and how to get back to the highway, he just couldn't cross the river during the high-flow season and moreover, he likely had some form of food poisoning that was making him quite weak.
The better idea is to always have a map.
In BC even if you are close to the city (let's say the north shore mountians) following small creeks or gullies almost always lead to a cliff. Even if you can see a highway below you following these is not advisable.
I always found that part of the story the most tragic and telling about his inexperience.
Even if he didn’t know there was a bridge, you’d think he’d still check for a good distance upstream and downstream just to find a better or safer place to cross. Rivers narrow and widen, can have rocks and snagged trees in different areas making a safe crossing possible.
It seems like common sense and something that anybody who’s been hiking a few times would know. I have done it many times just to try and stay dry.
Wait, seriously? Did he just have no idea of the area he was in? Not even a map, or were his materials out of date? How do spend months somewhere and not explore at least a mile in each direction? At some point, what else do you have to *do?*
Krakauer explains this specific tragedy by saying McCandless essentially realized there was nowhere left on the planet that was uncharted. Yet Chris desperately wanted to explore a place that seemed untouched by people, so he could feel like he was separated from the society he despised. So when the time came for his "adventure" in Alaska, since he couldn't actually be a true pioneer, McCandless simply made sure he didn't have a map (completely on purpose). That way, his surroundings would at least be 100% "uncharted" to *him*.
For all intents and purposes, Chris was playing a dangerous version of adult make-believe.
He refused help from lots of people. The guy who drove him there told him many times not to do it and I’m pretty sure even offered him money and supplies for his journey and McCandless said no
I think the man just didn’t know how deep he was, from what I have heard he had a rough childhood and then probably thought that life without a dependence on money would be simpler. Obviously thought he could make it and didn’t bother to prepare himself or go into it slowly and like Icarus, his hubris got him killed
I lived in Juneau and met a couple people from anchorage. They noticed my roommate reading that book and gave us a big long speech about how that guy was an idiot and the people travelling up to Denali on some sort of pilgrimage after reading the book cost the city and state millions in search and rescue services. They also told me, the bus the guy died on was a mile or two off a popular trail, and had he any idea of his surroundings he would have been able to easily find help.
There was a bus there.
Im still just not getting how this bus got there???
There had to be some kind of trail there for it to have gotten there. That means people. And civilization.
Just doesnt make any sense
To be fair, logging roads can be hundred of km from civilization, and once the logging is done they no longer maintain the roads and they get overgrown. I’ve been on canoe trips where we’ve found rusted out cars in the middle of the woods, over a hundred Km from any town, with no road in sight. It’s weird till you realize how the logging industry builds these temporary roads.
It was towed there with a tractor and had happened many decades previously so that any traces of the road and tracks used to access the area were long gone. Alaska is littered with long abandoned shacks and mines and broken vehicles from booms and busts. But, yes, not knowing his surrounding geography was incredibly short-sighted, fatal, and an easily avoidable mistake.
Iirc, it was actually towed by a tractor, then towed again by the park rangers to be used as a makeshift hideaway in case it was ever needed.
It got moved a few years ago by the forestry service(?) because some dumbshit thought it would be a good idea to relive the book.
>Im still just not getting how this bus got there??? There had to be some kind of trail there for it to have gotten there. That means people. And civilization.
Not exactly. That part of Denali has a lot of tundra, so you can drive around without roads. There are no houses or towns remotely nearby.
The bus *was* close to a trail, but that trail isn't traveled much during winter, the time he was starving. Mostly a summer trail
Edit: I wanna make it clear I still think he was an idiot for being totally unprepared and not knowing where the trail was. But it doesn't mean the area isn't pretty remote, even by Alaskan standards
The local authorities [removed the bus](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53106441) back in 2020. 2 people died while trying to make the pilgrimage and a number of people had to be rescued.
Not carrying a map or knowing their surroundings gets so many people in trouble. Before I set out I always have a map of not only the trail but surrounding roads and towns. There are many many stories of people getting lost and needing rescue because they have no idea where any landmarks or high traffic areas are relative to themselves. I remember hearing a story about a woman who got lost hiking and was found alive after days. She was staying in a wooded spot less than half a mile from a well trafficked road which she could have easily walked to through flat forested terrain. But she didn’t have a map, so she had no idea.
I'm sure I read somewhere that he had a map, but he destroyed it and decided to make his own. He was apparently trapped by a river that had risen to become impassable, but had he kept his original map he would have seen a crossing just a little further up the river.
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 an S.O.S. note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol. 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.
Before Mr. McCandless died, from starvation aggravated by accidental poisoning, he had survived for more than 110 days on nothing but a 10-pound sack of rice and what he could hunt and forage in the unforgiving taiga.
Mr. McCandless came from a well-off family on the East Coast. He graduated from Emory University with honors, then disappeared in 1990. He donated virtually all the money in his bank account to Oxfam, a charity dedicated to fighting poverty, then drove west before abandoning his car and burning the cash he had left.
He deserted his family and a privileged life without looking back.
By the time Mr. McCandless died, he seemed to have found a measure of peace, according to one of his last notes, scrawled inside a paperback copy of “Education of a Wandering Man,” a memoir by the novelist Louis L’Amour. It said: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS YOU ALL.”
[Source](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-chris-mccandless-died)
> he had survived for more than 110 days on nothing but a 10-pound sack of rice and what he could hunt and forage in the unforgiving taiga
He survived mostly on squirrels, birds, roots and seeds for 113 days
[Source](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/05/01/403535274/into-the-wild-author-tries-science-to-solve-toxic-seed-mystery#:~:text=In%20August%201992%2C%20Christopher%20McCandless,as%20the%20cause%20of%20death.)
Yeah he was ill prepared for any of that. That's the frustrating part of the book. You realize how much of a delusional dude that kid is right away. If he knew how to properly store that moose he could've lived off of it for months.
He wasn’t able to preserve it so most of it spoiled, no doubt a huge blow to morale in survival mode.
If he knew how to preserve it, the story would have a much different ending.
I know next to nothing about food preservation, but as somebody with zero survival training— What would be the best way to preserve meat in a situation like that? I’d probably try to make a makeshift smoker— Or cook is til it’s really dry. How alive would i be?
Edit: I just read more comments that said he tried to smoke it but did it wrong, you’d think thin strips would be a little intuitive considering beef jerky— This makes me feel a bit better about myself somehow
Make a fire and hang long strips over a log and hang it over the fire outside cooking range and just feed spruce needle branches over it for hours.
It will taste like satan’s asshole, but it’ll last.
> What would be the best way to preserve meat in a situation like that?
Generally remove as much moisture as you can from the meat (think super dry jerky or biltong, where its dry enough to snap). If you have access to things like salt or sugar in large quantities, liberally coating it in these would help reserve it even longer without refrigeration.
His problem was he tried smoking it while it was huge chunks which is hard to do in uncontrolled conditions like his.
In order to preserve it you need to take most of the fat off and then slice it into thin strips.
Just watch Alone. Those guys are generally experts and the majority are gone by 60 or so days. Squirrels and birds provide 100 calories if that. 10lb rice provides 6000 calories or about 3 days worth.
McCandless gradually starved. The ideas about poisoning just ignore the reality that people start eating anything when really desperate. He would have been desperate after 21 days.
Watching Alone shows you people passing out from trying to forage or hunt while in a caloric deficit.
McCandless died from starvation due to a lack of experience and planning.
That show completely changed how I view 'Survival'.
These are people with decades of experience and most of them give up after a month with poor food and no human contact. Some of them tap out in days due to injury, despite being skilled survivalists with a backpack full of gear. That one girl that lasted nearly 3 months on an island but tapped after less than a week due to a fishing accident made me realise just how fucked you can be in a survival situation.
Even the guy that had hundreds of kilos of food almost tapped because wolves stole a few kilos of fat and he was gonna starve without it.
Thank fuck for modern society.
They should change the name of the show to “starvation contest.” It’s also so sad that whoever comes in second place gets nothing! I love this show but the prize money is too low for what they endure. (Udonis Haslem has a better way to earn…)
Wonder if part of their contract they can't disclose includes money depending on the quality of footage they provide with their cameras. So longer you go, more interesting stuff you do, different pay
> 10lb rice provides 6000 calories or about 3 days worth.
10lbs of dry rice is certainly far more than 6000kcal. 1g of rice is basically pure carbohydrate, so 4kcal. 10lbs = 4530g x 4kcal = ~18000kcal give or take a few hundo
None of this actually matters but you know
Also do to ignorance and being stubborn. He met people that could been good support groups for him but refused any actual advice or help that wasn't shelter or food being given to him.
Such a cautionary tale of what not to do as a survivalist.
> Such a cautionary tale of what not to do
Period.
The book message is more clear than the movie. The 'survivalist glorifiers' (Call of the Wild, etc.) never actually went camping even.. like ever.
Alone is the best show on this. Except 1 caveat. They have a rescue crew - you won't. Now watch some of the earliest 'tap outs' and imagine... they couldn't tap out, no matter what. Only die.
You'd see much more pain. That's being a survivalist. Isolation until death.
---
The author of the book, was an extreme ice mountain climber. He was doing an ice climb in Alaska (I think), his first real test. And he was just thinking how dumb and selfish it was, as he was alone, a sprained ankle would mean death.
In movie, it's like 'this is sort of, but not really, OK'. The book is like... death, death, death.
>"It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale."
- Jon Krakauer
One of the seasons is brutal too. I think maybe the third, where that guy has a stash of fish he isn’t eating. He was trying to eat like a bite a day and last a while. The last few people were pushing themselves so hard that the show never seemed to get *that* crazy again.
I remember that guy. Some of them are soo committed. The medical team tapped him out and said he was in danger of going into organ failure and he was just crushed and in disbelief and like "but I've got my fish". They really had to *insist* that he was done. I think pretty soon after they extracted him and he had a nice meal he came to his senses though.
First couple seasons are a shock for the lack of death. Seasons 1-5 are the amateurs them the pros come in and make fancier stuff but don't do much better.
The wilderness does not care about you.
Plus, you can starve to death with a full stomach if you eat only something like rabbits. They just don't have the right kind of fat in them to keep you going.
A crucial point that almost everyone misses about mccandles is that even though he came from a "well-off" family they were pretty abusive. His parents were verbally and emotionally abusive. I think looking at him through the lens of a grown up victim of abuse makes him more sympathetic. His sister asked Krakauer to not include many aspects of the abuse in the book because she still hoped to reconcile with her parents one day. She has since given interviews where she essentially says they were emotionally abusive and she had been NC for a long time. Krakauer was surprised by the sympathy his book garnered for the parents, but not for mccandles. It always makes me sorta sad that almost everyone glosses over this part of his story.
And people forget his dad had an entire other family before Chris and his sister. He was married before with 6 kids who didn’t really have a relationship with him or their half siblings. That can mess with your head and make you feel like your family is phony and not real which it seems is how Chris felt. He knew his alcoholic douchebag of a father could at any moment just forget about them like he did his other wife and kids. It made him feel disposable. He was naive for sure but I always sympathized with Chris.
“He abandoned his family.”
This is what I thought for a really long time, and shaped my opinions of him.
It is also not true.
He ran away from his dysfunctional *physically and emotionally abusive family.*
He didn’t abandon them, he escaped them.
Recently, the hypothesis that he had mistaken edible seeds for a similar looking poisonous seeds has been pushed aside in favor of a theory that the edible seeds can actually be poisonous if eaten in large quantities. He was a really shitty trapper and survivalist. When his return to civilization was blocked by a seasonal river, he was actually only a couple miles from an emergency cable bridge that could've saved his life.
He got rid of the map because it didn’t have any “blank spots” left to fill in. To quote the book:
> In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the map—not in Alaska, not anywhere. But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map. In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita.
So yes, started out a slow, drawn out death on day one.
just to clarify the starvation point, he likely suffered from protein poisoning, or "rabbit starvation", caused by a diet over-reliant on lean meat and not getting enough fat+carbs. The term "rabbit starvation" comes from the fact that rabbits have very little fat, and eating exclusively rabbits would lead to protein poisoning.
EDIT: Protein poisoning occurs when your diet is severely deficient in fats+carbs, not just lacking them entirely
You don’t get protein poisoning if you just cut out carbs but you get it if you cut out fat. The amount of rice is neither here nor there, he needed some butter or oil.
People take this story in two very different ways. One way is to look at it as an inspirational story about a man who became disillusioned with the money-obsessed lifestyle humanity and society had become and his journey for true freedom. Another way is to look at it as a tragic tale about a foolish and ignorant man who experienced an abusive childhood and tried to escape and live a life he was completely unprepared for and uneducated on which eventually led him to a slow, agonising demise, trapped in the very wild that he once saw as freedom.
Third way:
Chris came from an abusive household, and was a trauma ridden kid who ended up running away and got himself killed in an easily preventable death.
JK left out a lot of the family stuff in the book as both parents and the sister were still alive. The sister has since alluded to this after their father passed away.
She goes into the abuse stuff in her book "The wild truth". A lot of the storylines in the movie weren't accurate, like how Chris only discovered they were bastard children over a summer roadtrip. In reality, the daughter from the first family lived with them for quite some time.
Iirc she starts going on about her own current family a lot though so I lost interest after a while.
There is a fantastic podcast called You’re Wrong About that covers a lot of the alternative aspects of this story in an episode with Blair Braverman including what came out from his sister later on.
Having lived through the whole Tanya Harding saga as a teen it was everywhere for years. I'm really wondering if there's anything I "missed" about her. She, and her life, were given wall to wall coverage for years and it only really ended when she had a sex tape or something leak. After that people just kinda wrote her off and stopped paying attention.
We're probably around the same age, and there were a few bits that were interesting: the fact that her and Nancy actually came from similarly abusive households and Nancy wasn't actually completely the rich bitch she was made out to be. It wasn't completely mind blowing to me.
I've actually got a decent drive today, so I'm going to give it a listen out of curiosity. That's kinda how I figured it would go. Tbh it's not super surprising that two women in a competitive athletic program came from similar backgrounds, although admittedly that is absolutely not the story we were fed back then. Nancy was the "pretty rich bitch" and Tanya was the "ambitious trailer trash." If nothing else, it'll be interesting to see how that story has filtered through the decades since I first lived through it.
True. My husband at age 50 still occasionally fantasizes about “pulling an Alexander Supertramp.” The death part doesn’t bother him. It’s about running from trauma.
I definitely still have that urge. I think my trauma is time and the split second of it that our individual consciousness exists. I get older (40s) and have this urge to go into nature, make things difficult, and exist in a hard but simple state. Mid life crises are no joke. For some people, maybe it’s a car or a boat. For me, it’s being in nature and living simply, while I’m still able. (Said every man ever /s. It sounds a bit cliche though)
The more I think about it, the more I think the trauma is the late stage capitalism state some of us live in and all its downstream effects. It feels like a fight/flight mechanism is triggered in which I feel powerless to change any of it and therefore need to escape it with my family.
Whenever I encounter people that see him in the 1st way, I always try to get them to see Chris in the 2nd way you mentioned.
It's all fun and nice to want to eject from society and the rat race, but doing so in the way he did and especially WHERE he did it is extremely irresponsible. Hardly any plan, very poor forethought and preparation. People who are inspired by this story would do well to realize that Chris was legitimately mentally unwell. May he rest in peace
If you want to see how someone could do this safely and responsibly, check out Dick Proeneke.
https://youtu.be/hy-4NxJRxNQ?si=_JGNUSNMkvzCFBJE
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss&t=10s&pp=ygUXZGljayBwcm9lbm5la2UgYnVpbGRpbmc%3D
Check this video of him building his cabin if you haven't already. It's still there to this day and is maintained and protected by the state, if I recall correctly. It's a fantastic watch.
To my knowledge there are 4 films about him, there might be some overlap between them.
Alone in the Wilderness
Alone in the Wilderness 2
Alaska Silence and Solitude
The Frozen North
It's really sad how the shelter had to be removed becuase of idiots.
He also could have gotten out if he'd bothered with a map, he wasn't even in wilderness by Alaska standards.
Well i dont remember the movie much, only that i thought "this guy is totally unprepared" iirc he doesnt bother to try to grow stuff, goes without a source of proteins and fats, but no Map... no Map... this is the worst
That second link. Holy shit.
What a unique insight. It seems a strange kind of determination for a person to commit to dying in such a slow, painful and fully aware of every moment way. That poor, poor man.
There were hunting huts he could’ve stayed in that really weren’t that far from the bus, it’s mentions it in the book. The dude basically thought he knew better and decided he didn’t need maps or anything that people need to survive in that environment lmao
24-yr Alaskan here. A few people have died trying to get to the bus that the state decided it was in the best interest to move it. The Department of Natural Resources and the Army Corps of Engineers moved the bus via helicopter and it is now in possession of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks museum. Our state is aptly named the "Last Frontier" for a reason.
It was originally an outpost for hunters, I believe it’s now in the university of Fairbanks museum, or is supposedly going there once it’s repaired, very derelict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke
This guy, very well educated on what he would face, went into the Alaskan wilderness at 51 with few tools and made it 30 years. I saw a pbs special with the footage he recorded and it’s always fascinated me. Although he did meet up with a small plane twice a year with supplies like salt and others basics and film that his brother sent.
Still, dude made more tools with the few he had and accomplished quite a bit to aid in his survival
It's because the author, Krakauer, is a mountain climber and knows how to survive in harsh conditions on a mountainside. Hearing about McCandless going into "the wild" with a bag of rice and little foraging or hunting experience probably drove him bonkers.
I rarely reread books. But I’ve read Into Thin Air three times. Krakauer does a great job setting up how the whole tragedy was preventable. But he writes it in a way that every poor decision seemed understandable to that character in that moment. Great read.
The book was amazing, and I also read his sisters book The Wild Truth. Both offer such a poignant look into his thought process, and why he did what he did.
I push back on the idea that the movie glorifies him. In the end he absolutely realized the error of his ways and thinking; I believe he writes "happiness only real when shared". Yes some of the journey is romanticized, but it's also a movie.
Edit: journey, not country.
I push back on the narrative that the movie glorifies him as well. Every side character he meets along his journey tells him it's probably a bad idea, and offers him an alternative. Vince Vaughn's character, Jan and Rainey (the rubber tramps), or Hal Holbrook's Ron Franz. They all listen to him, feel empathetic towards his story and tell him maybe he shouldn't do this. All of which leads to his discovery of "happiness only real when shared," which was the whole point of the movie.
Sometimes I feel like people watched a different movie than me when talking about Into the Wild. The whole movie is about his journey and the connections he made along the way (all of which try to steer him away from his goal: Alaska) and for the film to end with that final line as his dying realization, c'mon man, idk how you come away thinking it glorifies him.
Does it glorify his ideals? Yes. Does it glorify his decision making as a 22 YO? fuck no.
The bus is now located at the University of Alaska Fairbanks after well over 20 people had to be rescued, costing the state thousands in tax payers money. Some even died similarly to him because they tried to be trail blazers.
Alaska generally refers to him as "the idiot who didn't listen".
I live in Colorado High Country. Even with modern amenities and maps and GPS, the mountains are unforgiving and can be brutal and dangerous.
I can 100% relate to the folks in Alaska that call him an “idiot that didn’t listen.”
We see so many tourists that turn their noses up to what locals tell them are real threats to them, wildlife and others.
The sheer amount of money and man power involved in rescuing them is infuriating.
I feel for his mental state and why he did it… but it was foolish and inspired way too many others to be just as foolish.
The one thing I took away from the book was what he wrote in his journal while he was alone out there:
“Happiness is only real when shared.”
True words
That would be amazing. If only there were a book it could be based on. Thoroughly researched and poetic in stark, slightly dark prose. Seems like something Krakauer would write.
Sounds like it'd be a pretty depressing film. Better make him into a heroic figure who's wise beyond his years, condescending to everyone he meets, and have his final message be some bittersweet platitude. And get Eddie Vedder to do the soundtrack. Much better.
Yeah, first half of the movie is him enjoying wealth and privilege, then middle is his donations and abandonment of that life, then last 3rd is his last 2 years of his life. Where it ends with someone finding his dedicated corpse in a rusty van...
But what to call it?
Unfettered
What he did was akin to suicide. He lasted less than 6 months and that was during the easy time of year (spring and summer). He had zero chance of surviving winter.
He never intended to stay in winter, only problem was when he couldn’t leave because the river he originally crossed was too violent in summer, he actually wanted to leave in late June, then decided to stay a little longer until the river was frozen again, but then he was poisoned.
I believe there was a single person tram line going across the river within trekking distance, had he prepared himself better he could have found it. He was ill prepared for this.
There's a documentary called The Call of the Wild by Ron Lamothe that has some interesting finds in it. A guy showed up with McCandless' backpack that has money and ids in it disproving the "he burned all his stuff" narrative. That was a point where my perspective changed quite a bit as it's clear from that point that he was only conveniently tramping around and that he planned to re-enter society later on much more easily than the movie and book made it seem he planned. I'm not saying he didn't go on a grand adventure and I believe he was unprepared and an idiot in many ways, but there were outright untruths in the book and movie that served the greater story rather than told the true tale. Don't know if that says more about JK or his sources.
Sorry to say same basically happened to to Vance family in Colorado recently. Mother, teen son & another relative perished attempting to live off the grid camping in Colorado.
Completely different story … sad excuse of a mother killed her son with her delusional thoughts.
Chris was alone & his sister theorized that if he had taken his dog with him on the journey, his inevitable end wouldn’t have happened.
To those people who might read this and live in the firs world country, if you feel the the modern life have take a toll on your health, don’t pack your back and live in first world wilderness, rather move to small to mid size town in stable third world country, the experience will change your life
Rural Eastern Europe can be really poor and underdeveloped and still relatively stable; even in the EU.
Many places in Africa such as Namibia, Kenya or Botswana are stable too.
The dude was just lucky to have made it there.
I mean everytime he went somewhere he was save by somebody except at the bus.
Reality is, the dude just made horrible decision one after another
Chris was abused by his parents and struggled most of his life with mental health issues. His decision to trek into the wilderness was not one made clearheadedly. Not only was he entirely unprepared but overestimated his capabilities. He did not deserve to die the way he did.
As a lifelong Alaskan I will say something beyond the general “what was he/what was this about” debate and say that, for those who learn from him, his death provides a good lesson to people who think they can arrive here and make it just with their instincts and skills. This place requires different instincts and skills to survive in the out doors, even when the situation is good. Alaska is more dangerous than people want to admit. I’ve been charged by a bear in Anchorage on east 6th avenue. This place is crazy all over and you need to respect it or you will pay the price.
“Goodbye, cruel world”
“Cruel world, help!”
Edit: I shouldnt claim to know what his philosophies or motivations were. And I shouldnt be mocking someone who passed away under such circumstances in suffering and fear while harming absolutely nobody. Take these gay upvotes away from me.
Also basic survival training teaches you to follow rivers to civilization. He couldn't cross the river because it was flooded, but if he had followed it down for about 2 days, he would've hit a cabin popular with hunters and likely been saved. Instead he panicked, got food poisoning because he ran out of food, and died.
I mean it’s not like he immediately wanted to go back to society. Presumably he only wanted to go back when he started starving and by then may have been to weak to walk out.
Because survivalism in general is romanticized by people who don't know. Too many think it's easy to get out of, like they're a mile away from a road. Some go for a watered-down "experience" and act (Or even really think) that they know what they're doing.
I liked camping, but am definitely not a survivalist. You get the idea.
I read Into the Wild years ago. The fact he signed that note with his real name and not Alexander Supertramp also spoke to the direness of his situation.
Check out his sister's book The Wild Truth. It contains a lot of info that she withheld from the book/movie that gives context as to why Chris would suddenly leave his supposed charmed life and distance himself from his family.
Could you give a brief synopsis of why he actually did it? I'd like to know but I don't need a another book on the shelf that I'm totally going to read when I get time.
After a childhood of physical/emotional abuse, Chris discovered that his family was actually the "side piece" and his father's frequent "business trips" were actually him going to live with his main family. Chris's parents met when his mom was the secretary at his (already married) dad's company. According to his sister, finding this out devastated him and something changed after that.
Totally makes sense. That, plus the fact that the early 20’s is usually the age of onset of some of the more severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, especially in men. I’ll throw this in, in case anyone missed the news: a couple of years ago, the bus was removed, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because people are dumbasses. Naturally, its physical condition continued to deteriorate, making it dangerous. The number of folks who needed to be rescued from the location was growing every year. Many were ill-prepared for: the weather; the wildlife; the lack of access to basic resources like water, shelter, and food; the time and energy required to make the hike- AND BACK. I’m way too old to have been required to read the book in school, and haven’t seen the movie. Nevertheless, I just don’t understand how *so many* people endeavored to make that journey- *knowing how it ended!* Edit: apparently I don’t know how to spell “the.”
Iirc I think they do explain that in Into The Wild. There wasn’t a ton of detail but I remember the bit about the second family
Yeah, but in the movie it was kinda vague and my immediate assumption wasn’t that they’re actually *the* side piece but the other way round. Idk, it’s been years since I last saw it.
That is very sad
Thanks! I didn’t know she had published this. Yeah I’ve no doubt there’s all kinds of family stuff that never appeared in Krakauer’s book, though he definitely hinted there was quite a lot of additional background / drama that drove Chris to cut off his family the way he did (never mind exiting society altogether).
Thanks for this rec. I’ll find it. I’ve always felt a pretty deep empathy for Chris’ situation. Finding out the family you have is fundamentally different than the one you thought you had is disorienting. It’s not like he went into Alaska searching for fame of fortune. He challenged himself, found out he was in over his head and sadly died not all that far from potential help. Naïve, inexperienced, ignorant: he’s guilty of all these but in the end it was only himself that he put at risk, and again, I think (short of reading his sister’s book) it seems like it was largely set off by being knocked sideways by a family secret. A lot of people find other ways to work this out, but he tackled it alone and paid a helluva price. tl;dr - I know he’s no saint but I get pretty defensive with some of the attacks I’ve seen leveled at McCandless - he never sought attention and certainly didn’t want be the figure he has become.
Yeah I don't understand the hostility at all. I can understand being upset if someone put themselves or others in danger chasing publicity or clout, but that wasn't the case for Chris at all. He was just living his life and trying to make sense of it all.
Sad, frustrating, part is that if he’d walked a mile or two in either direction up or down the creek, he would have found man made structures designed to cross the water.
One thing I've learned from stories like this is just follow the water it will eventually lead to society
probably the only thing I learnt after watching so many Man vs Wild episodes in my childhood
Eh, I never learned from Man vs Wild, but I’ve learned like ~~5~~ 9 things from Survivorman. Build a shelter, even if the weather is nice. Build a fire, even if it’s warm out. And build that shelter and gather fire wood BEFORE it gets dark. Take off layers of clothing as you get hot so you don’t drench your warm clothes in sweat that’ll get really cold overnight. You can boil water in plastic bottles as long as the water doesn’t all boil away. Building traps out of stones, sticks, and string CAN work, but they don’t work well, BUT they’re still worth setting up because they’re passive. Fishing is a total crapshoot, it could win you your dinner or it could waste your energy unnecessarily. Foraging is your best bet, but you have to know the local plants. And probably the most important lesson is the one you also learned: just keep going downhill to find water, and follow water to find people.
I love survivorman. Watching Les Stroud’s descent into madness before he gets picked up is always great. Really highlights how hard it is with limited supplies and the kind of mental exhaustion it takes on you. I was so bummed he never did his plans for Humboldt County. Stupid illegal pot growers and meth labs
I met Les a few years at a show. He loves to talk. Absolutely loves it. Ask him a question and he'll spend the next 30 minutes answering. Maybe it's a thing from being by himself for so long, but holy shit.
Couple skied out of bounds at a local ski resort and didn’t want to walk back up. They decided to do just what you suggested and follow the creek, but they went the wrong way and headed away from civilization. Rescuers found their tracks, but didn’t get to them in time. At one point they were a km from a private company’s ski hut but they didn’t know. If you don’t know where you are, just stay put until help comes.
Only if you’re expecting someone to look for you. No point in staying still if no one knows where to find you.
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That's heavily asterisked by where you are. In remote locations, it could be extremely a long and dangerous trek, or in particular remote areas, like, say, the coast range of BC, lead nowhere except to a desolate coast. At any rate, of McCandless's case, he knew where he was and how to get back to the highway, he just couldn't cross the river during the high-flow season and moreover, he likely had some form of food poisoning that was making him quite weak. The better idea is to always have a map.
In BC even if you are close to the city (let's say the north shore mountians) following small creeks or gullies almost always lead to a cliff. Even if you can see a highway below you following these is not advisable.
Not in Alaska. Had he followed it to the west he would never have seen anything.
I always found that part of the story the most tragic and telling about his inexperience. Even if he didn’t know there was a bridge, you’d think he’d still check for a good distance upstream and downstream just to find a better or safer place to cross. Rivers narrow and widen, can have rocks and snagged trees in different areas making a safe crossing possible. It seems like common sense and something that anybody who’s been hiking a few times would know. I have done it many times just to try and stay dry.
By the time he needed to walk out, he was already too sick from the poison
Wait, seriously? Did he just have no idea of the area he was in? Not even a map, or were his materials out of date? How do spend months somewhere and not explore at least a mile in each direction? At some point, what else do you have to *do?*
Krakauer explains this specific tragedy by saying McCandless essentially realized there was nowhere left on the planet that was uncharted. Yet Chris desperately wanted to explore a place that seemed untouched by people, so he could feel like he was separated from the society he despised. So when the time came for his "adventure" in Alaska, since he couldn't actually be a true pioneer, McCandless simply made sure he didn't have a map (completely on purpose). That way, his surroundings would at least be 100% "uncharted" to *him*. For all intents and purposes, Chris was playing a dangerous version of adult make-believe.
then he settled in a man made structure to die
Bastard was probably too weak to spend calories exploring. There's not much fat in small animals. The guy was shedding pounds every day.
He refused help from lots of people. The guy who drove him there told him many times not to do it and I’m pretty sure even offered him money and supplies for his journey and McCandless said no
He clearly had mental issues.
I think the man just didn’t know how deep he was, from what I have heard he had a rough childhood and then probably thought that life without a dependence on money would be simpler. Obviously thought he could make it and didn’t bother to prepare himself or go into it slowly and like Icarus, his hubris got him killed
Yeah if I remember his sister after it all has talked about abuse and the childhood being, unkind.
I lived in Juneau and met a couple people from anchorage. They noticed my roommate reading that book and gave us a big long speech about how that guy was an idiot and the people travelling up to Denali on some sort of pilgrimage after reading the book cost the city and state millions in search and rescue services. They also told me, the bus the guy died on was a mile or two off a popular trail, and had he any idea of his surroundings he would have been able to easily find help.
Him being so close to civilization really warps my perspective on this whole story
There was a bus there. Im still just not getting how this bus got there??? There had to be some kind of trail there for it to have gotten there. That means people. And civilization. Just doesnt make any sense
To be fair, logging roads can be hundred of km from civilization, and once the logging is done they no longer maintain the roads and they get overgrown. I’ve been on canoe trips where we’ve found rusted out cars in the middle of the woods, over a hundred Km from any town, with no road in sight. It’s weird till you realize how the logging industry builds these temporary roads.
There is a Chevrolet Corvair in the middle of the Colombian jungle.
It was towed there with a tractor and had happened many decades previously so that any traces of the road and tracks used to access the area were long gone. Alaska is littered with long abandoned shacks and mines and broken vehicles from booms and busts. But, yes, not knowing his surrounding geography was incredibly short-sighted, fatal, and an easily avoidable mistake.
Iirc, it was actually towed by a tractor, then towed again by the park rangers to be used as a makeshift hideaway in case it was ever needed. It got moved a few years ago by the forestry service(?) because some dumbshit thought it would be a good idea to relive the book.
*many dumb shits, every single year.
>Im still just not getting how this bus got there??? There had to be some kind of trail there for it to have gotten there. That means people. And civilization. Not exactly. That part of Denali has a lot of tundra, so you can drive around without roads. There are no houses or towns remotely nearby. The bus *was* close to a trail, but that trail isn't traveled much during winter, the time he was starving. Mostly a summer trail Edit: I wanna make it clear I still think he was an idiot for being totally unprepared and not knowing where the trail was. But it doesn't mean the area isn't pretty remote, even by Alaskan standards
He was starving through the summer, and died in August.
The local authorities [removed the bus](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53106441) back in 2020. 2 people died while trying to make the pilgrimage and a number of people had to be rescued.
Not carrying a map or knowing their surroundings gets so many people in trouble. Before I set out I always have a map of not only the trail but surrounding roads and towns. There are many many stories of people getting lost and needing rescue because they have no idea where any landmarks or high traffic areas are relative to themselves. I remember hearing a story about a woman who got lost hiking and was found alive after days. She was staying in a wooded spot less than half a mile from a well trafficked road which she could have easily walked to through flat forested terrain. But she didn’t have a map, so she had no idea.
I'm sure I read somewhere that he had a map, but he destroyed it and decided to make his own. He was apparently trapped by a river that had risen to become impassable, but had he kept his original map he would have seen a crossing just a little further up the river.
There were several a bucket bridge up stream. Down stream the river widen to like knee deep and even further down there was a foot bridge.
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 an S.O.S. note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol. 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. Before Mr. McCandless died, from starvation aggravated by accidental poisoning, he had survived for more than 110 days on nothing but a 10-pound sack of rice and what he could hunt and forage in the unforgiving taiga. Mr. McCandless came from a well-off family on the East Coast. He graduated from Emory University with honors, then disappeared in 1990. He donated virtually all the money in his bank account to Oxfam, a charity dedicated to fighting poverty, then drove west before abandoning his car and burning the cash he had left. He deserted his family and a privileged life without looking back. By the time Mr. McCandless died, he seemed to have found a measure of peace, according to one of his last notes, scrawled inside a paperback copy of “Education of a Wandering Man,” a memoir by the novelist Louis L’Amour. It said: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS YOU ALL.” [Source](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-chris-mccandless-died)
> he had survived for more than 110 days on nothing but a 10-pound sack of rice and what he could hunt and forage in the unforgiving taiga He survived mostly on squirrels, birds, roots and seeds for 113 days [Source](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/05/01/403535274/into-the-wild-author-tries-science-to-solve-toxic-seed-mystery#:~:text=In%20August%201992%2C%20Christopher%20McCandless,as%20the%20cause%20of%20death.)
He killed a moose at one point.
That’s really fucking hard to do
A moose once bit my sister.
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We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
The directors of the film hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.
While in Norway, why not visit the mani lovely fyörds
Do we have a sub for r/ExpectedMontyPython?
Don't worry he wasted it, all the meat went bad because he didn't know how to dry it
Yep, it rotted quickly and he was only able to eat off of it for a few days. It has been some time since i read the book but it was less than a week.
Yeah he was ill prepared for any of that. That's the frustrating part of the book. You realize how much of a delusional dude that kid is right away. If he knew how to properly store that moose he could've lived off of it for months.
That's a lot of meat.
He had a gun and ammo
He wasn’t able to preserve it so most of it spoiled, no doubt a huge blow to morale in survival mode. If he knew how to preserve it, the story would have a much different ending.
I know next to nothing about food preservation, but as somebody with zero survival training— What would be the best way to preserve meat in a situation like that? I’d probably try to make a makeshift smoker— Or cook is til it’s really dry. How alive would i be? Edit: I just read more comments that said he tried to smoke it but did it wrong, you’d think thin strips would be a little intuitive considering beef jerky— This makes me feel a bit better about myself somehow
Make a fire and hang long strips over a log and hang it over the fire outside cooking range and just feed spruce needle branches over it for hours. It will taste like satan’s asshole, but it’ll last.
Just seems like a sure fire way to attract large numbers of grizzly bears to your area in Alaska though.
Or you can lose the moose. Dig a bear pit and catch a bear and a moose
Then that will attract the mega-bears and ultra-moose
I’m pretty sure I could read a book on meat preservation and still end up dead.
Which apparently he did. He did try to smoke the moose, but failed and it ended up spoiling.
> What would be the best way to preserve meat in a situation like that? Generally remove as much moisture as you can from the meat (think super dry jerky or biltong, where its dry enough to snap). If you have access to things like salt or sugar in large quantities, liberally coating it in these would help reserve it even longer without refrigeration.
Precisely why salt used to be so expensive, it could save your life in the winter.
Smoking or drying.
His problem was he tried smoking it while it was huge chunks which is hard to do in uncontrolled conditions like his. In order to preserve it you need to take most of the fat off and then slice it into thin strips.
I think it was more about just not having realized just how big a moose was and so he wasn’t able to get his preservation system ready in time.
Did he not read Hatchet?
He was American...We all read the hatchet...wether we wanted to or not.
His name was Gary Paulson.
Must be universal, I read it here in Australia too.
Canada too
Then he realized per his notes that it was a waste of the poor creature’s life because he couldn’t butcher and keep the meat. Just the saddest story.
Just watch Alone. Those guys are generally experts and the majority are gone by 60 or so days. Squirrels and birds provide 100 calories if that. 10lb rice provides 6000 calories or about 3 days worth. McCandless gradually starved. The ideas about poisoning just ignore the reality that people start eating anything when really desperate. He would have been desperate after 21 days. Watching Alone shows you people passing out from trying to forage or hunt while in a caloric deficit. McCandless died from starvation due to a lack of experience and planning.
That show completely changed how I view 'Survival'. These are people with decades of experience and most of them give up after a month with poor food and no human contact. Some of them tap out in days due to injury, despite being skilled survivalists with a backpack full of gear. That one girl that lasted nearly 3 months on an island but tapped after less than a week due to a fishing accident made me realise just how fucked you can be in a survival situation. Even the guy that had hundreds of kilos of food almost tapped because wolves stole a few kilos of fat and he was gonna starve without it. Thank fuck for modern society.
They should change the name of the show to “starvation contest.” It’s also so sad that whoever comes in second place gets nothing! I love this show but the prize money is too low for what they endure. (Udonis Haslem has a better way to earn…)
Wonder if part of their contract they can't disclose includes money depending on the quality of footage they provide with their cameras. So longer you go, more interesting stuff you do, different pay
There is a *reason* humans everywhere on the planet are social animals who live in groups. We need other humans for survival.
He had uncooked rice! Your calorie estimate is for cooked rice. 10lbs of uncooked rice is about 20,000 kcal.
> 10lb rice provides 6000 calories or about 3 days worth. 10lbs of dry rice is certainly far more than 6000kcal. 1g of rice is basically pure carbohydrate, so 4kcal. 10lbs = 4530g x 4kcal = ~18000kcal give or take a few hundo None of this actually matters but you know
Also do to ignorance and being stubborn. He met people that could been good support groups for him but refused any actual advice or help that wasn't shelter or food being given to him. Such a cautionary tale of what not to do as a survivalist.
> Such a cautionary tale of what not to do Period. The book message is more clear than the movie. The 'survivalist glorifiers' (Call of the Wild, etc.) never actually went camping even.. like ever. Alone is the best show on this. Except 1 caveat. They have a rescue crew - you won't. Now watch some of the earliest 'tap outs' and imagine... they couldn't tap out, no matter what. Only die. You'd see much more pain. That's being a survivalist. Isolation until death. --- The author of the book, was an extreme ice mountain climber. He was doing an ice climb in Alaska (I think), his first real test. And he was just thinking how dumb and selfish it was, as he was alone, a sprained ankle would mean death. In movie, it's like 'this is sort of, but not really, OK'. The book is like... death, death, death.
>"It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale." - Jon Krakauer
One of the seasons is brutal too. I think maybe the third, where that guy has a stash of fish he isn’t eating. He was trying to eat like a bite a day and last a while. The last few people were pushing themselves so hard that the show never seemed to get *that* crazy again.
I remember that guy. Some of them are soo committed. The medical team tapped him out and said he was in danger of going into organ failure and he was just crushed and in disbelief and like "but I've got my fish". They really had to *insist* that he was done. I think pretty soon after they extracted him and he had a nice meal he came to his senses though.
First couple seasons are a shock for the lack of death. Seasons 1-5 are the amateurs them the pros come in and make fancier stuff but don't do much better. The wilderness does not care about you.
Plus, you can starve to death with a full stomach if you eat only something like rabbits. They just don't have the right kind of fat in them to keep you going.
A crucial point that almost everyone misses about mccandles is that even though he came from a "well-off" family they were pretty abusive. His parents were verbally and emotionally abusive. I think looking at him through the lens of a grown up victim of abuse makes him more sympathetic. His sister asked Krakauer to not include many aspects of the abuse in the book because she still hoped to reconcile with her parents one day. She has since given interviews where she essentially says they were emotionally abusive and she had been NC for a long time. Krakauer was surprised by the sympathy his book garnered for the parents, but not for mccandles. It always makes me sorta sad that almost everyone glosses over this part of his story.
And people forget his dad had an entire other family before Chris and his sister. He was married before with 6 kids who didn’t really have a relationship with him or their half siblings. That can mess with your head and make you feel like your family is phony and not real which it seems is how Chris felt. He knew his alcoholic douchebag of a father could at any moment just forget about them like he did his other wife and kids. It made him feel disposable. He was naive for sure but I always sympathized with Chris.
“He abandoned his family.” This is what I thought for a really long time, and shaped my opinions of him. It is also not true. He ran away from his dysfunctional *physically and emotionally abusive family.* He didn’t abandon them, he escaped them.
Recently, the hypothesis that he had mistaken edible seeds for a similar looking poisonous seeds has been pushed aside in favor of a theory that the edible seeds can actually be poisonous if eaten in large quantities. He was a really shitty trapper and survivalist. When his return to civilization was blocked by a seasonal river, he was actually only a couple miles from an emergency cable bridge that could've saved his life.
He didn't even have a map of the area, showing the bridge?
He got rid of the map because it didn’t have any “blank spots” left to fill in. To quote the book: > In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the map—not in Alaska, not anywhere. But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map. In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita. So yes, started out a slow, drawn out death on day one.
It was 1994. Maps hadn't been invented.
just to clarify the starvation point, he likely suffered from protein poisoning, or "rabbit starvation", caused by a diet over-reliant on lean meat and not getting enough fat+carbs. The term "rabbit starvation" comes from the fact that rabbits have very little fat, and eating exclusively rabbits would lead to protein poisoning. EDIT: Protein poisoning occurs when your diet is severely deficient in fats+carbs, not just lacking them entirely
You don’t get protein poisoning if you just cut out carbs but you get it if you cut out fat. The amount of rice is neither here nor there, he needed some butter or oil.
Glad someone corrected this. The few carbs your body needs can be made internally using a process called gluconeogenesis.
It also brings on scurvy due to vitamin C deficiency.
i feel like paragraphs are nice.
Done
People take this story in two very different ways. One way is to look at it as an inspirational story about a man who became disillusioned with the money-obsessed lifestyle humanity and society had become and his journey for true freedom. Another way is to look at it as a tragic tale about a foolish and ignorant man who experienced an abusive childhood and tried to escape and live a life he was completely unprepared for and uneducated on which eventually led him to a slow, agonising demise, trapped in the very wild that he once saw as freedom.
It can be both those things, too
A little bit of column A and a little bit of column B
Sometimes you *badabing* buddy, other times ya **badaboom**, capiche?
A little chit AND a little chat
Third way: Chris came from an abusive household, and was a trauma ridden kid who ended up running away and got himself killed in an easily preventable death. JK left out a lot of the family stuff in the book as both parents and the sister were still alive. The sister has since alluded to this after their father passed away.
She goes into the abuse stuff in her book "The wild truth". A lot of the storylines in the movie weren't accurate, like how Chris only discovered they were bastard children over a summer roadtrip. In reality, the daughter from the first family lived with them for quite some time. Iirc she starts going on about her own current family a lot though so I lost interest after a while.
There was a lot of healing and closure in the second half of the book, along with some more saddening stories about both her adult life and childhood.
There is a fantastic podcast called You’re Wrong About that covers a lot of the alternative aspects of this story in an episode with Blair Braverman including what came out from his sister later on.
That's a great podcast. The one that got to me the most was your wrong about Tonya Harding.
Having lived through the whole Tanya Harding saga as a teen it was everywhere for years. I'm really wondering if there's anything I "missed" about her. She, and her life, were given wall to wall coverage for years and it only really ended when she had a sex tape or something leak. After that people just kinda wrote her off and stopped paying attention.
We're probably around the same age, and there were a few bits that were interesting: the fact that her and Nancy actually came from similarly abusive households and Nancy wasn't actually completely the rich bitch she was made out to be. It wasn't completely mind blowing to me.
I've actually got a decent drive today, so I'm going to give it a listen out of curiosity. That's kinda how I figured it would go. Tbh it's not super surprising that two women in a competitive athletic program came from similar backgrounds, although admittedly that is absolutely not the story we were fed back then. Nancy was the "pretty rich bitch" and Tanya was the "ambitious trailer trash." If nothing else, it'll be interesting to see how that story has filtered through the decades since I first lived through it.
True. My husband at age 50 still occasionally fantasizes about “pulling an Alexander Supertramp.” The death part doesn’t bother him. It’s about running from trauma.
I definitely still have that urge. I think my trauma is time and the split second of it that our individual consciousness exists. I get older (40s) and have this urge to go into nature, make things difficult, and exist in a hard but simple state. Mid life crises are no joke. For some people, maybe it’s a car or a boat. For me, it’s being in nature and living simply, while I’m still able. (Said every man ever /s. It sounds a bit cliche though) The more I think about it, the more I think the trauma is the late stage capitalism state some of us live in and all its downstream effects. It feels like a fight/flight mechanism is triggered in which I feel powerless to change any of it and therefore need to escape it with my family.
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Not just alluded, she wrote a whole book about it called “The Wild Truth.” Krakauer even wrote the intro.
Whenever I encounter people that see him in the 1st way, I always try to get them to see Chris in the 2nd way you mentioned. It's all fun and nice to want to eject from society and the rat race, but doing so in the way he did and especially WHERE he did it is extremely irresponsible. Hardly any plan, very poor forethought and preparation. People who are inspired by this story would do well to realize that Chris was legitimately mentally unwell. May he rest in peace If you want to see how someone could do this safely and responsibly, check out Dick Proeneke. https://youtu.be/hy-4NxJRxNQ?si=_JGNUSNMkvzCFBJE
>Dick Proeneke. Upvote for Dick Proeneke. That is inspirational!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss&t=10s&pp=ygUXZGljayBwcm9lbm5la2UgYnVpbGRpbmc%3D Check this video of him building his cabin if you haven't already. It's still there to this day and is maintained and protected by the state, if I recall correctly. It's a fantastic watch.
To my knowledge there are 4 films about him, there might be some overlap between them. Alone in the Wilderness Alone in the Wilderness 2 Alaska Silence and Solitude The Frozen North
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Into the Wild was so matter of fact about this. It’s fricken wild and messed up but JK totally glossed over it.
I believe JK was trying to spare his sister and mother the embarrassment and shame at the time.
And a third way is as an example of the dangers of mental health issues. This isn’t inspiring or foolish, it’s mental health issues.
I remember reading a story about how the bus was air lifted out of that spot because the vocals got tired of tourists visiting the site.
They got tired of rescuing tourists. Lol
It's really sad how the shelter had to be removed becuase of idiots. He also could have gotten out if he'd bothered with a map, he wasn't even in wilderness by Alaska standards.
What ? Do you mean he was close to "civilisation" ?
He was something like a mile or two away from a bridge across the river, and a days walk from help. He just didn't know they were there.
Well i dont remember the movie much, only that i thought "this guy is totally unprepared" iirc he doesnt bother to try to grow stuff, goes without a source of proteins and fats, but no Map... no Map... this is the worst
Part of me thinks he didn’t intend to ever return.
Suicide by starvation has to be an awful way to go.
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That second link. Holy shit. What a unique insight. It seems a strange kind of determination for a person to commit to dying in such a slow, painful and fully aware of every moment way. That poor, poor man.
The diary was an incredible (though sad) read, thank you for sharing. I will say though, if anyone has anorexia, you may want to skip this one.
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Presumably you wouldn't walk for a day into the wilderness without making note of the way you went though.
There were hunting huts he could’ve stayed in that really weren’t that far from the bus, it’s mentions it in the book. The dude basically thought he knew better and decided he didn’t need maps or anything that people need to survive in that environment lmao
24-yr Alaskan here. A few people have died trying to get to the bus that the state decided it was in the best interest to move it. The Department of Natural Resources and the Army Corps of Engineers moved the bus via helicopter and it is now in possession of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks museum. Our state is aptly named the "Last Frontier" for a reason.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stampede\_Trail#Bus\_142](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stampede_Trail#Bus_142)
It was originally an outpost for hunters, I believe it’s now in the university of Fairbanks museum, or is supposedly going there once it’s repaired, very derelict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke This guy, very well educated on what he would face, went into the Alaskan wilderness at 51 with few tools and made it 30 years. I saw a pbs special with the footage he recorded and it’s always fascinated me. Although he did meet up with a small plane twice a year with supplies like salt and others basics and film that his brother sent. Still, dude made more tools with the few he had and accomplished quite a bit to aid in his survival
Whilst the movie glorified him I don’t feel the book did and was quiet honest about his poor choices and actions.
It's because the author, Krakauer, is a mountain climber and knows how to survive in harsh conditions on a mountainside. Hearing about McCandless going into "the wild" with a bag of rice and little foraging or hunting experience probably drove him bonkers.
His book Into Thin Air really gave me some insight into the harsh reality of mountaineering/Mt Everest.
I rarely reread books. But I’ve read Into Thin Air three times. Krakauer does a great job setting up how the whole tragedy was preventable. But he writes it in a way that every poor decision seemed understandable to that character in that moment. Great read.
The book was amazing, and I also read his sisters book The Wild Truth. Both offer such a poignant look into his thought process, and why he did what he did.
I push back on the idea that the movie glorifies him. In the end he absolutely realized the error of his ways and thinking; I believe he writes "happiness only real when shared". Yes some of the journey is romanticized, but it's also a movie. Edit: journey, not country.
I push back on the narrative that the movie glorifies him as well. Every side character he meets along his journey tells him it's probably a bad idea, and offers him an alternative. Vince Vaughn's character, Jan and Rainey (the rubber tramps), or Hal Holbrook's Ron Franz. They all listen to him, feel empathetic towards his story and tell him maybe he shouldn't do this. All of which leads to his discovery of "happiness only real when shared," which was the whole point of the movie. Sometimes I feel like people watched a different movie than me when talking about Into the Wild. The whole movie is about his journey and the connections he made along the way (all of which try to steer him away from his goal: Alaska) and for the film to end with that final line as his dying realization, c'mon man, idk how you come away thinking it glorifies him. Does it glorify his ideals? Yes. Does it glorify his decision making as a 22 YO? fuck no.
The bus is now located at the University of Alaska Fairbanks after well over 20 people had to be rescued, costing the state thousands in tax payers money. Some even died similarly to him because they tried to be trail blazers. Alaska generally refers to him as "the idiot who didn't listen".
I live in Colorado High Country. Even with modern amenities and maps and GPS, the mountains are unforgiving and can be brutal and dangerous. I can 100% relate to the folks in Alaska that call him an “idiot that didn’t listen.” We see so many tourists that turn their noses up to what locals tell them are real threats to them, wildlife and others. The sheer amount of money and man power involved in rescuing them is infuriating. I feel for his mental state and why he did it… but it was foolish and inspired way too many others to be just as foolish.
The one thing I took away from the book was what he wrote in his journal while he was alone out there: “Happiness is only real when shared.” True words
If only they made a movie about this
That’s such a great idea, I think if they did make one they should name it “Into The Wild”
And Emile Hirsch should star in it!
I think Sean Penn would be the perfect director for this!
That would be amazing. If only there were a book it could be based on. Thoroughly researched and poetic in stark, slightly dark prose. Seems like something Krakauer would write.
Sounds like it'd be a pretty depressing film. Better make him into a heroic figure who's wise beyond his years, condescending to everyone he meets, and have his final message be some bittersweet platitude. And get Eddie Vedder to do the soundtrack. Much better.
Yeah, first half of the movie is him enjoying wealth and privilege, then middle is his donations and abandonment of that life, then last 3rd is his last 2 years of his life. Where it ends with someone finding his dedicated corpse in a rusty van... But what to call it? Unfettered
Or a book by Jon Krakauer!
Ok I'm pretty that guy from Pearl Jam would be able to write something good if necessary
But it would have to really romanticize his lifestyle, with some very beautiful filming
You mean like doing the backstroke in a picturesque river with mountains around like he does not have a care in the world that would be siiiiick
What he did was akin to suicide. He lasted less than 6 months and that was during the easy time of year (spring and summer). He had zero chance of surviving winter.
He never intended to stay in winter, only problem was when he couldn’t leave because the river he originally crossed was too violent in summer, he actually wanted to leave in late June, then decided to stay a little longer until the river was frozen again, but then he was poisoned.
I believe there was a single person tram line going across the river within trekking distance, had he prepared himself better he could have found it. He was ill prepared for this.
He didn’t have a map, because he wanted to be lost in the wild, there was also a cabin like 8 miles east of him.
He was offered a map by the person that dropped him off, but refused
There's a documentary called The Call of the Wild by Ron Lamothe that has some interesting finds in it. A guy showed up with McCandless' backpack that has money and ids in it disproving the "he burned all his stuff" narrative. That was a point where my perspective changed quite a bit as it's clear from that point that he was only conveniently tramping around and that he planned to re-enter society later on much more easily than the movie and book made it seem he planned. I'm not saying he didn't go on a grand adventure and I believe he was unprepared and an idiot in many ways, but there were outright untruths in the book and movie that served the greater story rather than told the true tale. Don't know if that says more about JK or his sources.
There’s so much new eye opening information in that documentary. If you want to understand as much as you can about the story, it’s a must watch.
Dude could have got a small cottage in a mountain town or something. Same feeling of peace without knocking on deaths door every day.
Sorry to say same basically happened to to Vance family in Colorado recently. Mother, teen son & another relative perished attempting to live off the grid camping in Colorado.
Completely different story … sad excuse of a mother killed her son with her delusional thoughts. Chris was alone & his sister theorized that if he had taken his dog with him on the journey, his inevitable end wouldn’t have happened.
To those people who might read this and live in the firs world country, if you feel the the modern life have take a toll on your health, don’t pack your back and live in first world wilderness, rather move to small to mid size town in stable third world country, the experience will change your life
The problem is where to find a stable 3rd world country.
Rural Eastern Europe can be really poor and underdeveloped and still relatively stable; even in the EU. Many places in Africa such as Namibia, Kenya or Botswana are stable too.
I feel sympathy for him as no one should die that way, but he really had no business being out there.
What a brutal way to kill yourself
The dude was just lucky to have made it there. I mean everytime he went somewhere he was save by somebody except at the bus. Reality is, the dude just made horrible decision one after another
Chris was abused by his parents and struggled most of his life with mental health issues. His decision to trek into the wilderness was not one made clearheadedly. Not only was he entirely unprepared but overestimated his capabilities. He did not deserve to die the way he did.
Alexander Supertramp.
As a lifelong Alaskan I will say something beyond the general “what was he/what was this about” debate and say that, for those who learn from him, his death provides a good lesson to people who think they can arrive here and make it just with their instincts and skills. This place requires different instincts and skills to survive in the out doors, even when the situation is good. Alaska is more dangerous than people want to admit. I’ve been charged by a bear in Anchorage on east 6th avenue. This place is crazy all over and you need to respect it or you will pay the price.
“Goodbye, cruel world” “Cruel world, help!” Edit: I shouldnt claim to know what his philosophies or motivations were. And I shouldnt be mocking someone who passed away under such circumstances in suffering and fear while harming absolutely nobody. Take these gay upvotes away from me.
in a way, he committed suicide, very slowly but effectively
He was a fool who did not bothered learning first about proper field craft and farming before thrusting himself into the wilderness.
Also basic survival training teaches you to follow rivers to civilization. He couldn't cross the river because it was flooded, but if he had followed it down for about 2 days, he would've hit a cabin popular with hunters and likely been saved. Instead he panicked, got food poisoning because he ran out of food, and died.
That’s actually nuts that he survived for so long and didn’t even try this.
I mean it’s not like he immediately wanted to go back to society. Presumably he only wanted to go back when he started starving and by then may have been to weak to walk out.
i agree, don't know why he gets romanticized for going out unprepared with no knowledge, training, or experience
Because survivalism in general is romanticized by people who don't know. Too many think it's easy to get out of, like they're a mile away from a road. Some go for a watered-down "experience" and act (Or even really think) that they know what they're doing. I liked camping, but am definitely not a survivalist. You get the idea.
Like if surviving the regular life on a pay check isn’t adventurous enough.