The Odyssey of Christopher McCandless

McCandless graduated from Emory University in Atlanta in May 1990, with a double major in history and anthropology. Soon afterwards he gave his college savings of more than $24,000 to the charity Oxfam and, that summer, left Virginia in his old Datsun, heading west in what looked like a cross-country trip. His sister Carine later wrote that their troubled family life and his reading of Jack London's The Call of the Wild drove his urge to disappear.

By the end of the summer of 1990 he had driven west to the desert of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, on the border of Nevada and Arizona. There a flash flood disabled his car. He left it behind and carried on by hitchhiking and taking whatever work came along, as a restaurant cook or a farmhand, under the name Alexander Supertramp. Through the winter of 1990 and into 1991 he seems to have lived in camps with other drifters in the Sierra Nevada region.

Location precision: The spot where the car was abandoned isn't pinned; the pin marks the recreation area.

When his money ran out, he took a job as a grain elevator operator in Carthage, a tiny farming town in eastern South Dakota. It became the nearest thing he had to a base during his two years on the road: he came back here between journeys, and it was from South Dakota that he set off to hitchhike to Alaska in April 1992. Krakauer's book draws on the memories of the people who knew him here.

Location precision: The grain elevator isn't identified; the pin marks the town.

With a canoe and no permit, he paddled down the Colorado River past Lake Havasu, the Cibola and Imperial wildlife refuges and the Yuma Proving Ground; rangers who heard about him from other boaters went looking for him, worried that he was running dangerous water with no safety gear. He followed the river all the way to Mexico, crossing the border by way of a spillway at the Morelos Dam, built in 1950 to divert Mexico's share of the river to the farms of the Mexicali valley.

Below the dam the river broke up into channels and waterfalls he could not navigate in a canoe, and he never reached the open sea by water. He gave up the river journey and spent a few days alone at El Golfo de Santa Clara, a fishing village on the Gulf of California in the state of Sonora. Then he made his way back north across the border and began drifting again, through the West and back to South Dakota.

Location precision: Where he camped isn't known; the pin marks the village.

In April 1992 McCandless hitchhiked from South Dakota to Alaska. People later remembered seeing him at Dot Lake and around Fairbanks. He carried about ten pounds of rice, a .22 rifle, a few books — one of them on local plants — and a little camping gear. Fairbanks, the largest town in Alaska's interior, was the last place he spent among other people. Since 2020 the bus in which he died has belonged to the University of Alaska's Museum of the North here, which plans to restore and display it.

Location precision: His movements in town aren't known; the pin marks central Fairbanks.

On 28 April 1992 an electrician named Jim Gallien gave "Alex" a ride from Fairbanks to the start of the Stampede Trail outside Healy, near Denali National Park. Worried by the young man's light pack, scanty food and lack of experience, Gallien tried hard to talk him out of it and even offered to drive him to Anchorage to buy proper gear. McCandless refused, accepting only a pair of rubber boots, two sandwiches and some corn chips. Gallien was the last person to see him alive.

Location precision: The exact drop-off point isn't recorded; the pin marks Stampede Road at Healy.

About 28 miles along the trail he found an abandoned 1946 bus left by road workers, and lived in it for some four months, hunting small game and gathering plants. In July, by Krakauer's account, he tried to walk out but turned back at the Teklanika River, swollen with snowmelt. He died in the bus in August; hunters found his body on 6 September 1992. After at least 15 rescues and two drownings of hikers trying to reach it, the bus was airlifted out on 18 June 2020.