Christopher McCandless

Thanks for the link to the article with photos that Chris took. I hadn't seen several of those. The one of the Tek River is very interesting for several reasons. The river doesn't look that high to me. It looks about average for summer. When the level is real high it goes up over a lot of that big g...

Krakauer did make a pretty big deal about Chris not having a good map and how a good topo map would have indicated the presence of a gauging station about a mile down the Tek River from the trail crossing. Couple thoughts about that.... Chris had been on enough back country trips to know that detail...

I don't know about the other states but Alaska still has a lot of rural areas where you can buy land and have no property tax, no building codes and almost no regulations on land use at all other than restrictions on criminal activity and federally managed stuff like EPA regs on watersheds. Denali b...

Teklanika crossing.jpg Tek mid-April.JPG Tek open March 30.JPG Chris exercised caution when he decided to not try crossing the Teklanika when the water was too high to seem safe to him. That would be a normal, rational decision especially given his earlier problems with rivers. I don't understand w...

Very good writing and very thoughtful. I like his analysis of why so many Alaskans seem to denigrate Chris... "Don’t we all have dreams stirring somewhere in our depths, untapped longings that are essential to our identity as human beings?" he writes. "Chris’ willingness to risk every...

I wonder why Chris didn't plan to write more during his trip out the Stampede. This was going to be his greatest adventure. He had written journals before about his trips. Why didn't he take a notebook to write in? He did take (or find) a bunch of books at the bus. He wrote short entries on a blank ...

IMG_9198.jpg IMG_9193.jpg Took a ride out to the bus on Sunday. Really great trail this year. A friend rode her bike out there in 4 hours. Took me 1 and 1/2 hours on the snow machine. Kind of disappointed that the original journals are gone. Carine took them in and copied them I guess. She sent the...

I don't know that much about mental illness to say that Chris was insane. But it does seem like he could have done more to get rescued. He was obviously a very intelligent guy who excelled in school and in athletics but had a lot of family problems. Sure he was looking for a different path in life t...

Anchorage journalist Craig Medred makes a good case that Chris may have been suffering from a mental illness. This article made me mad at first because I admire Chris for his can-do attitude. But after reading this article several times it began to make a lot of sense regarding why Chris didn't do m...

FALL 2011 004.jpg Did this lady say how long she was out at the bus and how many other people she saw? My impression is that back in '92 very few people went very far out the Stampede in summer. There was the occasional hiking group but most of them turned around at the Teklanika. People came to De...