On the road
After graduating from Emory in 1990, he gave $24,000, left over from a $42,000 bequest left by a friend of the family's for his last two years of college, to the charity Oxfam International and began traveling across the country, using the name "Alexander Supertramp" (Krakauer notes the connection with WH Davies, Welsh author of 'Autobiography of a Super-Tramp' published in 1908). 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 kayaking 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 and began his attempt to live off the land. He had a 15-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 the 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 189 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 and swifter than it had been when he had crossed it in April.
On August 12, with his situation growing more desperate, McCandless 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, which contains 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!"
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?"
His body was found in his sleeping bag inside the bus, weighing an estimated 67 pounds. 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 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 speculated that a fungus Rhizoctonia leguminicola could have grown 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 to death.
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