IS THERE MORE TO THE CHRISTOPHER MCCANDLESS STORY???

[SteveSalmon]

~SS

[GoNorth]

Permission granted to delete this topic I created.

Delete it? No, please don't. Ok, the quarreling was not too nice, but the discussions on the pages before were quite interesting, so I think they should stay there.

[bobenns]

Its a good topic. There are endless possibilities. Just because something looks so obvious doesn't mean that's how it is.

I think users can go in and edit or delete their own posts. We all get caught up in the heat of things from time to time and nature has given us the ability to learn from experience.

[Jedidiah]

Please delete this thread steve. I believe it makes the forum look bad as a whole and uninviting for guests

[SteveSalmon]

~SS

[GoNorth]

Fully agree with Steve!

[Kurttheman24]

So is there any update on the map? It's been nearly two months with out a a new post?

[RSharkey]

I've read all posts on this thread, And it just seems to have come to an end with the arrival of user1. The arguments and bickering that went on between himself and certian others seems to have killed this thread completely, I however would like to reignite this thread with a valid point user1 posted in his first post. He mentioned somthing about mccandless being right handed and as the arm that may or may not have been injured was infact his right arm this would effect his hand writing. So as user1 asked (But got no reply only abuse) was there a decline in Chris's hand writing? If so this could be clear evidence of damage to the arm.

[GoNorth]

I think this is the best place to write down the following:

I recently talked to a lady from Fairbanks who has lived in the area for 22 years and I asked her her opinion about Chris and the bus and the pilgrimages etc. Surprisingly, she told me that she is convinced that Chris wanted to commit suicide! Well, here are the reasons she told me:

1. He had tried to do so several times before. ?? Oh, really? What exactly do you mean? She then said that he had tried to killed himself by cutting his veins some (long or short?) time before the whole trip, and there had been a second attempt she didn’t remember very well. As I had never read or heard about that, I asked her where she got the information and she said that his sister had told this on tv sometime. Oh well. I don’t know. I mean, if this was true, it wouldn’t really change very much about Chris’s image, at least for me, because it was obvious that he was unhappy in his former life and had to deal with a lot of problems, so why not. I just have difficulties to believe that Carine talked about this in some tv show and no one ever mentioned this anywhere else again. Which doesn’t mean that I suspect the lady to lie, not at all, but perhaps she hasn’t seen the stuff on TV herself, but somebody else told her who had heard that… and so on. Anyway, even if he HAD attempted to kill himself before his departure, we all know that he was doing really well during a big part of his travels, so I think that no such thing could lead to the assumption that he went into the wild with the intention of dying.

And I said to her that I really don’t believe he wanted to die the way he did. First of all, there should be less painful ways to commit suicide than starvation. And of course, we know that he tried to walk back to the road by the beginning of July.

2. After having said a few words about the condition of the river (and that he should have known that the volume of the river can change quickly – but also change back just in the same way), she explained to me that if he had really wanted to get rescued from the bus, it would have been very very easy. She knows the area well and also knows what it looked like about 20 years ago, as she had once spent a night in the bus with her husband (when they had to change their itinary somewhere because of a forest fire or so) a long time ago, earlier than 1992. (By the way, the word “Stampede trail” is not the correct term, it has always been the Stampede Road, leading from the Parks Highway into the park and to Kantishna. For people from the lower 48, this might be a trail, but for Alaskans, it is a road used by different vehicles and has always been so). Ok, so she said that this place is anything but wilderness, planes fly (and flew) regularly over the area and the road/trail doesn’t ever stay unfrequented for such a long time. I told her that I had seen this youtube video stating that people knew somebody was living at the bus, and she said: Of course, people knew!
And this is where I insert a quote by Ron Lamothe from another topic:

...If this account is true, then the “1st bus” they saw was indeed Fairbanks 142—it was the only bus still out there according to all the sources. Sort of mind boggling, isn’t it? Not only did several people in Healy know all spring and summer that Chris was out there, but at some point in late June this guy and his friends actually drove right by the bus in a Toyota Tercel! Where was Chris during this? Was he at or near the bus? Did he see or hear them? Try to make contact with them? Try to avoid or hide from them? And I can think of a dozen other questions that this story raises in my mind (and also related to questions surrounding where he was in late June), as I’m sure it does for others of you who are deeply invested in the details of that summer.

Actually, this fits exactly to what the lady claimed as well. She said that 'he really had to hide if he didn’t want to be seen' at the bus in all that time. I then reminded her that he wrote this SOS note towards the end and she replied 'yes, and stuck it to the window', while it would have made much more sense to write something on the roof of the bus for the planes to see it.
So, there had to be several people passing by once in a while and there were planes, regularly. The latter would have been the easiest way to get rescued. Why not simply by making a fire? I said that according to Krakauer’s book, Carine said that Chris would never have accepted to destroy nature (which I also found a bit strange already when reading it, because I think when you’re in real serious danger, this should not matter as much any more), but she again said that he didn’t even need to destroy anything, a simple campfire would have been enough, near the national park border, the park rangers would have been there in no time to hand him out the ticket…

So, well. More stuff to think about, as it seems. I mean, I am still convinced that Chris didn’t intend to die, when he left into the wild. And I can’t really imagine that he wanted to die in the end. But how could we explain the fact that he didn’t do anything to get rescued – up to the day he wrote the SOS note, which must have been in August (actually I still don’t know why Krakauer and the others seem to be so sure that it was on August 12 or 13, as Chris only indicated the month – perhaps they even knew about someone who had passed by before and hadn’t seen the note yet? Ok, no, I think I’m going too far)? Perhaps he didn’t want to be rescued by any kind of 'authority' and still hoped to get along by himself, until he finally realized too late that he was in serious danger of life. ???
Looking forward to reading your thoughts.

[SteveSalmon]

~SS