Into the Wild adventurer who starved to death in bus may have missed river crossing by one day: researchers

Researchers have determined that the subject of a bestselling book and popular movie who starved to death in a bus in the Alaskan wilderness 30 years ago may have been the victim of bad timing.

Oregon State University (OSU) hydrologist David Hill has published a paper that suggests unusually intense but short-lived rain runoff caused the high waters in the Teklanika River that turned back nomadic adventurer Christopher McCandless in 1992 prior to his death.

The paper is published in the July 2022 issue of science journal Frontiers in Earth Science.

“Mr. McCandless had unfortunate timing,” Hill said in a July 20 OSU release. “The specific day of his attempted crossing—July 5, 1992—coincided with a large amount of rainfall-driven runoff. Had his attempt occurred a bit on either side of that day, the conditions might have been more favorable and the outcome may have been different for him.”

McCandless, a 24-year-old American who had hitchhiked to Alaks in 1992 to hike the wilderness and live off the land, perished while living in an abandoned bus, nicknamed Bus 142, on the so-called Stampede Trail, which terminates near Healy, Alaska.

After crossing the Teklanika River, westbound, on April 28, McCandless lived in the 1946 International Harvester bus that had housed members of a mine-road construction crew decades previous. When he attempted to leave the wilderness on July 5, the swollen river turned him back, and he returned to the bus, about 14 kilometres away.

McCandless died of starvation in the bus, commonly used by hikers, on August 18, 1992. He kept a written journal, and his body was discovered by sheltering hunters on September 6.

Writer Jon Krakauer (A Perfect Storm) wrote a magazine article about McCandless in 1993, and he turned that into an international nonfiction bestseller, Into the Wild, in 1996. Actor-director Sean Penn adapted Into the Wild into an award-winning movie of the same name in 2007.

Hill and water-resources graduate student Christina Aragon of the OSU College of Engineering applied different computer models, using extensive weather and land-cover data, to arrive at a picture of the Alaska Range hydrology for 1992, as well as to determine, as much as possible, the river levels the day before and the day after July 5, the date of McCandless's ill-fated crossing.

Author Krakauer said the new information adds to his research about the event that, ultimately, led to McCandless's death. “David and Christina’s paper is fascinating to me for deeply personal reasons,” Krakauer said in a July 20 OSU release. “Over the three decades that have passed since Chris McCandless perished in Alaska, I’ve been eager to learn as much as possible about his experience from the moment he ‘walked into the wild’ in April 1992 until his death inside Bus 142 some four months later. This paper sheds a little more light about a key event during that period – his attempt to return to civilization halfway through his Alaska adventure.”

Paper coauthor Aragon said in the release that 1992 had seen an unusually late snowmelt, which may have been responsible for both facilitating and frustrating McCandless's two crossing attempts.

“The spring snowmelt in 1992 was delayed, which kept flows in the Teklanika relatively low and made it possible for Mr. McCandless to cross the river and reach Bus 142 at the end of April,” Aragon said. “When the snowmelt finally happened, it happened fast. After that, the river got higher or lower on roughly a weekly basis, depending on rain in the region. Streamflow in summer 1992 was more variable than usual because of the quick snowmelt followed by periods of heavy rain.”

Hill said in the release that a stream's water flow is determined by multiple factors, including rainfall, snowmelt, evaporation, and the amount of water absorbed by the soil.

“Those and many other complex processes determine the places water goes, how much of it goes where, and when it goes,” he said. “The two most significant drivers of streamflow are the patterns of precipitation and temperature.”

Hill and Aragon's research showed that the Teklanika watershed received about 27 inches of precipitation in the 1992 water year, which was 20 percent greater than average. As well, that year's mean daily temperature was a month later than normal to rise above freezing, and the summer rains were more intense than usual.

In the years following McCandless's death, many people trying to hike to Bus i42 have had to be rescued, and two hikers trying to cross the Teklanika River with the help of a rope drowned in separate incidents. Because of this, the bus was deemed a threat to public safety and was airlifted off the Stampede Trail by the Alaska Army National Guard in 2020.

The bus is now on display at the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks.

Writer Krakauer had the final say in the July 20 OSU release: “Although the paper can’t determine with certainty whether McCandless would have been able to safely exit the wild if he’d tried to cross the Teklanika River again at a later date, it raises poignant questions that are worthy of consideration.

“Perhaps even more importantly, the paper conveys valuable information about the dynamics of Alaska’s rivers—the fording of which has always struck me as one of the most dangerous aspects of backcountry travel in Alaska, based on close calls I personally had on numerous trips into Brooks Range, the Alaska Range and the Coast Mountains of Southeast Alaska," Krakauer continued. "David and Christina’s paper might help other adventurers avoid calamity going forward.”