Christopher McCandless
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Christopher J. "Alexander Supertramp" McCandless (February 12, 1968 – August, 1992) was a young man who gained some notoriety in the early 1990s after he took a nomadic journey around North America, terminating with his death in the Alaskan wilderness. He spent several months in the spring and summer of 1992 living in an old abandoned bus just outside of Denali National Park. He lived off the land, bringing with him only a small amount of rice and a hunting rifle, which he used to hunt game. He also subsisted on lingonberries and other things he found while foraging. In all, he survived a total of 113 days in the bush.
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Childhood & Education
McCandless grew up in a well-to-do family in the affluent Washington, DC suburb of Annandale. His father, Samuel Walter McCandless, a former rocket scientist, ran a lucrative consulting firm with Chris's mother, Billie McCandless (nee Johnson). Both parents came from working class backgrounds and worked long hours to provide a life of luxury for Chris and his sister Carine—a fact that Chris would one day look upon with scorn, citing what he saw as the hypocrisies of their materialist existence.
Chris was a smart, hard-working student who excelled in both academics and athletics. Once, during his senior year at W.T. Woodson high school, he announced to his family that he had no intention of going to college. He had decided, instead, to pursue his goal of serving humanity rather than working for material wealth. His parents convinced him that higher education would better enable him to accomplish his goals, and Chris enrolled at Emory University in Atlanta, where he was a model student. In addition to getting straight A's, he was a regular contributor to his school's newspaper and was offered a place in the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
Travels
After graduating from college in 1990, Chris took off on a road trip around the country, determined to be a rubber tramp—a vagrant with a car. He donated the $25,000 USD in his savings account to Oxfam and hit the road. He severed contact with friends and family back home; letters to his sister indicate that he harbored a great deal of resentment to his parents in particular.
His travels took him out west, to California and Arizona, where he abandoned his vehicle after it was damaged by a flash flood in a dry wash near the Grand Canyon. From there, he bought a canoe and floated down the Colorado River. He hoped to reach the Pacific Ocean, but, after crossing the border into Mexico he got lost in an intricate maze of canals and was rescued by local fishermen. He eventually made his way to the Gulf of California.
In early 1992, he went north to Carthage, South Dakota where he worked at a grain elevator. He planned on saving his money so he could make it to Fairbanks, Alaska. From there, he would live off the land, far away from civilization. In April 1992 he set off hitchhiking for Fairbanks and arrived a few weeks later. He was last seen alive by a man who gave him a ride from Fairbanks to the Stampede Trail. His body was found by hunters in September 1992.
His Legacy
- In 2002, as has been the trend for many recent years, hundreds of people journeyed to the bus on the Stampede Trail where Christopher's body was found. [1]
- McCandless' life and Alaskan voyage is recounted in the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer.