Christopher McCandless

Christopher McCandless (born February 12, 1968, El Segundo, California, U.S.—found dead September 6, 1992, Stampede Trail, Alaska) was an American adventurer who died from starvation and possibly poisoning, at age 24, while camping alone on a remote trail in Alaska. His death made him a figure of controversy, admired by some as an idealist in the tradition of David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy but disparaged by others as self-destructive.

McCandless was born in southern California. His father was an aerospace engineer who—in partnership with his second wife, Christopher’s mother—became a successful entrepreneur. The family relocated to the East Coast while Christopher was still a child. He grew up in Annandale, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., and later went to Emory University, where he excelled academically in history and anthropology and wrote for the campus newspaper. Always eager to travel, he drove to Fairbanks, Alaska, by himself during one summer vacation. Soon after receiving his bachelor’s degree in May 1990, he donated his savings to a charity, cut off communication with his family, and drove to Arizona, where his car was disabled by a flash flood in the vicinity of Lake Mead. Undeterred, he abandoned the vehicle and set out on foot.

McCandless traveled widely in the western United States as a self-styled tramp. He sometimes rode freight trains but mostly hitchhiked. In the autumn of 1990 he befriended Wayne Westerberg, the operator of a grain elevator in Carthage, South Dakota. McCandless worked for Westerberg for a time and then went south, launching an aluminum canoe on the Colorado River and paddling into Mexico. After reentering the United States, he spent much of autumn 1991 working in a McDonald’s restaurant in Bullhead City, Arizona. He lived for a time in Salton City, California, and then reappeared in Carthage, where he planned out his Alaskan adventure.

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McCandless hitchhiked through Canada and reached Fairbanks via the Alaska Highway on April 25, 1992. Three days later he hitched another ride southwest to the Stampede Trail. The driver thought him to be ill-prepared for an extended sojourn in the bush, as McCandless was carrying little more than 10 pounds (4.5 kg) of rice and a collection of books. In addition, he did not have a good map, and his .22 rifle was generally thought to have insufficient firepower for big-game hunting or defense against bears. McCandless’s original plan was to hike westward to the Bering Sea, but he ended up sheltering in an abandoned bus on the little-traveled trail. He lived by killing small animals (and one moose) and gathering roots and berries. In a manifesto written on plywood and signed Alexander Supertramp, he proclaimed himself “an extremist, an aesthetic voyager whose home is the road” and who now faced a “climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution.”

McCandless would have returned to civilization in early July 1992 had he been able to recross the Teklanika, but the river he had easily forded two months earlier was by then swollen with snowmelt, and he returned to the bus. Forced to continue on a substandard diet, he weakened and died in mid-August. His body, which weighed only 67 pounds (30.4 kg), was discovered by hunters on September 6. The cause of death was officially reported as starvation. However, in his final days McCandless recorded his own conviction that the seeds of the wild potato, or Eskimo potato (Hedysarum alpinum), had disabled him. Research undertaken years afterward at the behest of McCandless’s biographer Jon Krakauer and others identified the most probable agent of harm as l-canavanine, an amino acid that is found in wild potato seeds and functions as an antimetabolite. The specific danger had not been properly recognized during McCandless’s lifetime. However, the role that the seeds played in his death was debated.

Krakauer’s book, Into the Wild (1996, updated 1997), is the chief source of information about McCandless. The book was dramatized in a Hollywood film (2007) with the same title, directed by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch as McCandless. The book and film inspired numerous people from various countries to attempt visits to the bus, and many of the would-be pilgrims required rescue. After the deaths of two such seekers (2010 and 2019), Alaska state authorities had the bus removed in 2020 and taken to the Museum of the North in Fairbanks.