Jon Krakauer, "The Alaska Interior" and "The Stampede Trail," Selections from Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer, a regular contributor to Outside Magazine, rose to national prominence with the publication of Into the Wild, his investigative account of the life and death of Chris McCandless, a young man who disappeared after graduating from college in Georgia in the early 1990s and whose body was discovered two years later in an abandoned school bus in the wilds of Alaska. In an interview, Krakauer explained why he was driven to pursue McCandless's story in such detail:

I was haunted by the particulars of the boy's starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those in my own. Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaskan taiga, chasing down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession. In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons.

Retracing McCandless's journey, Krakauer meditates not only on what it means to be a man at the end of the twentieth century but also, more generally, on the place of the natural world in contemporary society.

After completing Into the Wild, Krakauer set off to study the tourist industry's guided climbs up Mount Everest. Into Thin Air, which also became an instant bestseller, is Krakauer's firsthand account of his experiences on a disastrous trip up Mount Everest that left nine climbers dead. The fact that this tragedy could easily have been avoided by staying down off the mountain has not escaped Krakauer's attention: "[W]hen I got back from Everest, I couldn't help but think that maybe I'd devoted my life to something that isn't just selfish and vainglorious and pointless, but actually wrong. There's no way to defend it, even to yourself, once you've been involved in something like this disaster. And yet I've continued to climb." Why do people embark on such adventures? What are they looking for? What is it they hope to achieve? These are the questions that animate Krakauer's writing; they are also the questions that he continues to try to answer for himself.

Krakauer, Jon. "The Alaska Interior" and "The Stampede Trail," Into the Wild. New York: Random House, 1996. 157-199.
Quotations from "Everest a Year Later: Lessons in Futility" and Krakauer's author introduction, Outside Magazine.
Digital image drawn from the Outside Online web site.

Links To Explore:

Letters to Outside Magazine: responses to Krakauer's original article about Chris McCandless, "Death of an Innocent."

Into Thin Air: Krakauer's September 1996 article for Outside Magazine recounting his climb of Mount Everest and the deaths of nine of his companions.

Outward Bound: a web site devoted to describing programs for individuals all over the world who wish to explore the environment and themselves.

Alaska/ Yukon/ Northwest Territories: A Graduate Student Retraces McCandless' Steps: an essay by Tom Boettger, a graduate student in Physics at Montana State University, documenting his travels through the same land McCandless and Krakauer explored.

Questions for Connecting:

• In "The Naked Citadel," Susan Faludi sets out to study how young men are turned into soldiers at a military academy and to record how this training process was upended when the academy was required to admit young women into its ranks. In detailing McCandless's journey into the wild, Krakauer provides a glimpse into another ritualized way of "becoming a man." Would you argue that McCandless's journey is consistent with The Citadel's efforts to create a certain kind of man? Or was McCandless's journey an attempt to escape from the masculine ideals embodied by The Citadel's students? What, if anything, do these two stories suggest about how masculinity will be defined and experienced in the twenty-first century?

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