Chris McCandless

Christopher McCandless
File:Chris McCandless.jpg Christopher McCandless in his camp on the Stampede Trail
Born	(1968-02-12)February 12, 1968 Washington, D.C., USA
Died	August 18, 1992(1992-08-18) (aged 24)[1] Stampede Trail, Alaska, USA
Parent(s)	Walt and Billie McCandless

Christopher Johnson McCandless (12 February, 1968 – 18 August, 1992) was an American wanderer who died near Denali National Park after hiking alone into the Alaskan wilderness with little food or equipment. Jon Krakauer wrote a book about his life, Into the Wild, in 1996, which inspired a 2007 film of the same name directed by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch.

Childhood and education

McCandless grew up in Annandale, Virginia, located in affluent Fairfax County. His father, Walt McCandless, worked for NASA as an antenna specialist. His mother, Wilhelmina "Billie" Johnson, was his father's secretary and later helped Walt establish and run a successful consulting company.

From early childhood, his teachers noticed that McCandless was unusually strong-willed. As he grew older, he coupled this with an intense idealism and physical endurance. In high school, he served as captain of the cross-country team, where he urged his teammates to treat running as a spiritual exercise in which they were "running against the forces of darkness....all the evil in the world, all the hatred."

He graduated from W.T. Woodson High School in 1986 and from Emory University in 1990, majoring in history and anthropology. His upper middle-class background and academic success masked a growing contempt for what he saw as the empty materialism of American society. "In his junior year he was offered membership in Phi Beta Kappa but declined on the basis that honors and titles are irrelevant," quoted from Into the Wild. The works of Jack London, Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau had a strong influence on McCandless, and he dreamed about leaving society for a Thoreau-like period of solitary contemplation.

On the road

File:Chris mccandless.JPG

Christopher McCandless

After graduating from Emory in 1990, he gave his $25,000 life savings to the charity Oxfam International and began traveling across the country, using the name "Alexander Supertramp" (Krakauer mentions WH Davies who wrote 'Diary of a Super Tramp' close to a 100 years ago). McCandless made his way through Arizona, California, and South Dakota, where he worked at a grain elevator. McCandless alternated between relatively settled periods, in which he was fairly gregarious and often worked a job, and time spent living with no money and little or no human contact, sometimes foraging successfully for food in the wild. He survived several dangerous trials during these wilderness periods, such as losing his car in a flash flood and canoeing down remote stretches of the Colorado River down to the Gulf of California. McCandless took pride in surviving with a minimum of gear and funds, and generally made little preparation.

For years, McCandless had dreamed of an "Alaskan Odyssey": he would live off the land, far away from civilization, and keep a journal describing his physical and spiritual progress as he faced the forces of nature. In April 1992 McCandless successfully hitchhiked to Fairbanks, Alaska. He was last seen alive by Jim Gallien, who gave him a ride from Fairbanks to the Stampede Trail. Gallien was concerned about "Alex", who had little gear and no experience in the Alaskan bush. Gallien tried to persuade Alex to defer his trip, and even offered to drive him to Anchorage to buy suitable equipment. McCandless refused all assistance except for a pair of rubber boots, two tuna melts, and a bag of corn chips.

After hiking the Stampede Trail, McCandless found an abandoned bus used as a hunting shelter parked on an overgrown section of the trail near Denali National Park (63°51′36.13″N 149°24′50.62″W) and began his attempt to live off the land. He had a 10-pound bag of rice, a Remington semi-automatic rifle, with plenty of .22LR hollow-tip ammunition, a book of local plant life, several other books, and some camping equipment. He assumed that he could forage for plant food and hunt game. Despite his inexperience as a hunter, McCandless successfully poached some small game such as porcupines and birds. Once he successfully killed a moose; despite this success he failed to preserve all the surplus meat, rather than thinly slicing and air-drying the meat of the moose, as is usually done in the Alaskan bush, he unsuccessfully attempted to preserve it by smoking it, following the advice of hunters he had met in South Dakota.

His journal contains entries covering a total of 113 days. These entries range from ecstatic to grim with McCandless' changing fortunes. In July, after living successfully in the bus for several months, he decided to leave, but found the trail back blocked by the Teklanika River, which was then considerably higher than when he had crossed it in April.

On September 6, 1992, two hikers and a group of moose hunters found this note on the door of the bus:

"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?"

On August 12 he wrote what are assumed to be his final words in his journal "Beautiful Blueberries" He tore the final page from Louis L'Amour's memoir, Education of a Wandering Man with the words:

"Death's a fierce meadowlark but to die having made

Something more equal to centuries Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness. The mountains are dead stone, the people Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness, The mountains are not softened or troubled

And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper."

On the other side of the page, McCandless added, "I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!"

His body was found in his sleeping bag inside the bus, weighing just 67 pounds (30 kilograms). He had been dead for more than two weeks. His official cause of death was starvation.

Biographer Jon Krakauer has suggested two factors which may have contributed to McCandless's death in August, 1992. First, he was running the risk of starvation due to to his increased activity, compared with the leanness of the game he was hunting. However, Krakauer insists that starvation was not, as McCandless' death certificate states, the primary cause of death. Initially, Krakauer claimed that McCandless might have ingested toxic seeds (Hedysarum alpinum). However, extensive laboratory testing proved conclusively that there was no alkaloid toxin present in McCandless' food supplies. In later editions of the book, therefore, Krakauer has maintained that a fungus Rhizoctonia leguminicola managed to grow on the seeds McCandless ate. However, there remains no evidence to support Krakauer's theory, and all available forensic data suggests that McCandless simply starved.

Cultural legacy

Krakauer's book made Christopher McCandless a heroic figure to many. By 2002, the abandoned bus (142) on the Stampede Trail where McCandless camped became a tourist destination. Sean Penn's film Into the Wild, based on Jon Krakauer's book, was released in September 2007 to widespread critical acclaim, including four stars from numerous major reviewers such as Roger Ebert. [2] As of October 21 2007, the film had a 81% 'fresh' rating on the Rotten Tomatoes film review database. [3] In October 2007, a documentary film on McCandless's journey by independent filmmaker Ron Lamothe, The Call of the Wild, was also released. McCandless's story also inspired an episode of the TV series Millennium, the album Cirque by Biosphere, and folk songs by singer Ellis Paul, Eddie From Ohio, and Harrod and Funck.

Unlike Krakauer and many readers of his book, who have a largely sympathetic view of McCandless, some Alaskans have negative views of both McCandless and those who romanticize his fate. Due to the fact that he had no maps, McCandless was unaware that a hand-operated tram crossed the impassible river only 6 miles from the Stampede Trail. There were also cabins stocked with emergency supplies within a few miles of the bus, although they had been vandalized and all the supplies were spoiled, possibly by McCandless himself, as detailed in Lamothe's documentary.

Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote: “I am exposed continually to what I will call the ‘McCandless Phenomenon.’ People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent […] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament […] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.”

Judith Kleinfeld wrote in the Anchorage Daily News that “many Alaskans react with rage to his stupidity. You'd have to be a complete idiot, they say, to die of starvation in summer 20 miles off the Park's Highway.”