On September the 6th, 1992, a group of moose hunters came across an old abandoned city
bus in the Alaskan wilderness. It was a pretty odd sight considering they were
almost 30 miles from the nearest town and nowhere near a road of any kind,
but it was also a welcome one - it had been a long day, and the bus represented an opportunity
to spend the night indoors (well, if you can actually count a rusting old bus as ‘indoors’).
Anyway, the moment the hunters stepped over the threshold and entered the vehicle,
they were hit by a wall of foul-smelling air so thick they could practically taste it.
This being the Alaskan bush, they first assumed an animal had crawled into the bus and died...
but then they found a sleeping bag, and inside that, the partially decomposed body of a man.
The police arrived on the scene via helicopter the following morning, and made haste to investigate
this most morbid case. This should have been a tricky one - half-rotten corpses in the middle
of nowhere don't give up their secrets easily (or so I'm told). But the officers were in for
a pleasant surprise, because, beside the body they found a diary and several undeveloped rolls
of film - a record, of sorts, of the man's life. And what an unusual existence it turned out to be.
You see, this body didn't belong to a grizzled trapper or a lost hiker,
but a 24-year old idealist who'd given up everything to try and live a simpler,
more authentic life. And the story of how he came to die in an old abandoned bus in
the middle of nowhere in Alaska is one of the most unusual I've ever told on this channel.
It starts with a bigamous marriage and ends with a botanical murder mystery,
and it’s either soaringly uplifting or utterly idiotic and depressing, depending on who you ask.
This is the tale of Christopher McCandless,
the man who walked into the wild... and never came back.
Christopher was born on February 12th 1968 in Inglewood, California. His father, Walt,
was an aerospace engineer who worked for NASA,
and his mother Billie helped run the family consultancy business. But don’t let this
affluent upbringing fool you - life in the McCandless home was a tale of endless strife.
Chris had a younger sister, Carine, as well as 6 half siblings from his father's first
marriage. In 2014, Carine McCandless published a memoir in which she alleged that her parents
were verbally and physically abusive both to each other, and to their children..
After graduating from high school in 1986 with excellent grades, Chris spent the summer on his
first major solo adventure. His family had relocated from California to Virginia when
he was still a kid, so he travelled back to his home state to spend time with his extended family
and a few old friends. But during this detour, he made a disturbing discovery.
When he was little his father had often spent time away from the family home. As a successful
businessman, you might think he was simply travelling for work, but no. He was spending
time in his *other* family home. You see, Walt had still been married to his first wife when he met
Chris’ mother Billie. Rather than, you know, get a divorce - or even break things off - he
simply split his time between the families, even having children with both women at the same time
(Chris would later discover that he was just 3 months older than one of his half brothers).
He was 18 when he found out, and it had a huge impact on him - some
people have even suggested that all the other craziness I’m going
to tell you about can be traced back to that one mad revelation.
Further education was a chance for Chris to fly the freaky family nest, and he excelled
at Emory University, graduating in 1980 with double honours in History and Anthropology.
Most people who knew him in those days expected him to follow a familiar path - start a career,
make a lot of money, maybe have a family.
But Christopher McCandless had no intention of living a conventional life. He saw the
expectations of society not as items on a checklist to be ticked off one by one,
but as a straitjacket designed to rob us of our freedom and stifle our creativity. And so,
in May 1990, he donated every penny he owned to Oxfam - well over $50,000 in today's money - and
without telling a soul where he was going, or even that he *was* going - he just... left.
He spent that first summer crossing the US in his beaten up yellow Datsun, making it as far as
Lake Mead before getting stuck in a flash flood that wrecked the engine and left him stranded.
Instead of turning back, Chris forged onwards, hiking, hitchhiking, and riding freight trains.
Over a two-year spree, traversing the land of the free, Chris,
built a new life for himself under the assumed name of Alexander Supertramp. It was an alter
ego of sorts - a self-made superhero whose only two powers were total freedom and body odour.
Nobody knows Christopher’s exact whereabouts during that time on the road, and what we do know
mostly comes from the memories of people whose paths he crossed along the way. He spent a few
months working as a grain operator for a man he met while hitchhiking in South Dakota, he lived on
the streets of Las Vegas, learned leather working from a retired Vietnam vet who grew so attached
to Chris he offered to adopt him as his grandson. He lived in hermit camps and off-grid communities,
hiked through some of the most spectacular national parks on
planet earth, and illegally kayaked down the Colorado river all the way to Mexico.
In short, he roamed where he pleased, answered to nobody, and completely cut himself off from the
usual worries and expectations of the rest of the world. He had no bills to pay, no boss to suck up
to, and no requirements beyond putting food in his belly and finding a place to rest his head.
He‘d left home in search of freedom... and that's exactly what he‘d found.
As exhilarating as that must have been…
it wasn‘t enough. It was true that Chris was no longer living by society's
rules... but he *was* still living *in society*, or at least, surrounded by it.
And so in early 1992, he ceased his carefree, wherever-the-wind-takes-me
wandering and began pathing his way purposefully north. His goal was the
United States' last great wilderness - a state that‘s comfortably bigger than France, Spain,
and Germany put together, but with less than half a percent of their combined population -
Alaska. It was to be the site of Alexander Supertramp's greatest - and final - adventure.
On the 28th of April, a Fairbanks electrician
called Jim Gallien gave Christopher a lift to the head of the Stampede Trail.
Most Alaskans know a thing or two about surviving in the wilderness, and Jim was immediately
concerned that Chris didn't exactly seem to be prepared for a long spell out in the bush.
He had little in the way of provisions, his rifle lacked the power to easily
take down Alaska's bigger game or its more dangerous wildlife,
and his hiking boots weren't even waterproof. He carried no compass, no snowshoes, and few
tools. He didn‘t even have a map. In short, Chris appeared to have none of the gear and no idea.
Jim Gallien was right to be concerned. Because he
would be the last person to see Christopher McCandless alive.
Chris’ original plan had been to hike clear across Alaska until he
hit the Bering Sea. But just 4 days and 30-odd miles into his journey,
having forded two rivers and skidded across several frozen beaver ponds,
he stumbled upon the abandoned bus that was to become his home… and eventually his tomb.
You won’t be surprised to hear that life in the Alaskan bush was pretty tough. The weather
was changeable and often extreme, and food was difficult to come by. But despite the hardships,
Chris was living his dream of existing entirely free of the influence of the outside world.
For food, he foraged for berries, dug up roots, and shot squirrels, ptarmigan, porcupines,
and even a moose - though he was unable to preserve this mighty mammal, so most of the meat
spoiled.. He survived encounters with bears and wolves, watched herds of caribou cross the Taiga,
and spent his downtime reading classics by Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Gogol.
Chris was clearly a resourceful guy - his two years on the road had proven that. But it seems
he’d underestimated just how hard it would be to live entirely off-grid in Alaska. And
while his diary shows he was able to gather a steady stream of food, he simply couldn’t
get his hands on enough calories to fuel his body through the challenging Alaskan days.
Despite his best efforts, slowly but surely, Christopher McCandless was beginning to weaken.
Pictures from the undeveloped rolls of film found with his body would
later reveal how thin, almost skeletal he became.
He must have recognised the danger he was in, because on day 67 of his Alaskan
Odyssey, he decided enough was enough; he packed up his meagre belongings,
said goodbye to his bus-based abode, and began hiking back up the Stampede
trail. Alexander Supertramp had decided it was time to return to civilisation.
Two days later he reached the Teklanika river... and what he saw made his spine
shiver. When he'd crossed this very stream from the other side, at the start of his journey,
it was knee deep and placid. Now, swollen by two months of summer meltwater, it had morphed into
a raging torrent of freezing, frothing death. Chris wasn’t the strongest of swimmers at the
best of times, but right now that didn’t matter one dime - the lovechild of Michael
Phelps and Flipper the Dolphin couldn’t have crossed that river and lived to tell the tale.
With little other choice, Chris simply turned around and headed back to the bus.
It’s hard to imagine just how scared he must have been as it hit home that he’d become trapped in
the wilderness, but some time after he got back to the bus - we have no way of knowing
exactly when - he wrote a brief note and posted it to the door of his makeshift home. It read:
*Attention Possible Visitors. S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to
hike out. 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 ?*
By the time someone finally read those words,
Christopher McCandless had been dead for almost 3 weeks.
In the days and weeks after Chris‘ return to the bus, his condition continued to deteriorate,
his body growing weaker as he slowly starved to death.
His diary entries during that period make for some pretty tough reading.
*Day 94 - Extremely weak. Fault of Pot. Seed. Much
trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great Jeopardy.*
*Day 100! Made it! But in weakest condition of life. Death looms as serious threat.
Too weak to walk out. Have literally become trapped in the wild. No game.*
Nobody knows exactly what Christopher was going through in those final few days of his life,
but there’s no doubt he knew he was going to die. And yet, despite the hunger, despite the hardship,
despite the loneliness, he still somehow managed to marvel at the beauty that was all around him.
In those final dying days, he took one final self portrait. In it, he’s smiling a beaming
smile and waving at the camera, and in his hand he holds a handwritten note that reads:
*I have had a happy life and thank the lord. Goodbye and my God bless all!*
If one of the objectives of Christopher’s trip was to find peace,
with this picture, I hope we can say that he truly found it.
On day 107, the final words in his diary simply read: beautiful blue berries.
Six days later, on day 113, the entries run out. So far as we know,
that was the day Christopher McCandless died. His autopsy would later show that he weighed
just 30 kilograms when he passed away, and his cause of death was ruled to be starvation.
That might sound fairly obvious given the circumstances, but interestingly enough,
that verdict has actually been a little controversial in the decades since.
You see, many people believe that Chris died not because he didn’t have enough to eat, but because
he accidentally ingested some kind of poison that left him too weak to gather enough food.
Jon Krakauer, author of the ‘Into the Wild,’ the book that first brought Christopher’s story
to the masses, has spent the last few decades attempting to prove that the seeds of the wild
potato plant - apparently referenced on day 94 of Chris’ diary - are not,
as botanists have long believed, harmless, but are in fact poisonous under the right circumstances.
He’s thrown plenty of theories around over the years, and most have been disproved.
But in 2015 he published a study that claimed to have found elevated levels of the antimetabolite
L-canavanine in sample seeds gathered from the site of the bus. The study ultimately
concluded that consumption of these seeds very likely contributed to Christopher’s death.
Anyway, poison aside, if you’ve read Into the Wild, or seen the film adaptation,
there’s a good chance you think of Christopher McCandless as an idealist who should be admired
for his courage and principles. But not everybody views him that way.
In fact, there are plenty of people who see Chris as an arrogant idiot
who got himself killed thanks to a woeful lack of understanding of what he was getting himself into.
As uncharitable as that hot-take may seem, there’s no denying that Chris was somewhat
underprepared for his final adventure. I’ve already mentioned that he tried to hike back
to civilisation 2 months into his trip before being thwarted by the swollen Teklanika river.
What I didn’t mention is that just 800 metres downstream from his attempted crossing point
was a hand-operated cable car that would have allowed him to cross the river with ease. If
he’d a map with him he’d have known that, and he would quite possibly still be alive today.
Ultimately, there's probably a kernel of truth in both viewpoints, but whatever your feelings
towards the man who called himself Alexander Supertramp, it's hard not to admire his single
minded determination to live the life he wanted to live. Most of us follow the pathways laid out
before us by society and the expectations of our families and friends without even
questioning it. And we all know plenty of people who diligently work away at careers they don’t
particularly like so that they can afford to buy things they neither want nor need.
Christopher McCandless saw our obsession with money, status,
success and material things and just… rejected it. He didn’t want a career,
he wanted a life, and he didn’t need ‘things,’ he craved experiences.
It’s funny to think that Chris walked into the wild in what many of us would already consider
to have been a simpler time. A time before the internet had wormed its way into every
corner of our lives, and before every one of us carried a smartphone in our pockets.
You could say his message is more relevant today than it’s ever been before, and that’s probably
why his story continues to speak to people even today, twenty years after his death.
Thanks for watching.