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.

Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (NY: Villard, 1996).
Digital image drawn from the Outside Online web site.
Quotes are taken from "Everest a Year Later: Lessons in Futility" and Krakauer's author introduction.

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 Learning:

• The Letters to Outside Magazine that followed Krakauer's initial article about Chris McCandless, "Death of an Innocent" record a wide range of responses to the article and to the events leading up to McCandless' death. In the selection of Into the Wild included in The New Humanities Reader, Krakauer discusses these responses and describes his efforts "trying to understand why some people seem to despise [McCandless] so intensely for having died [in the wilds of Alaska]" (435). Do the letters shed light any further light on this matter? What do you make of the fact that Krakauer's readers needed only a paragraph or two to express their assessment of McCandless' actions?
  

• In his article, Into Thin Air, Krakauer describes his own inadvertent encounter with nature's power. What is the difference, would you say, between the way that Krakauer thinks about nature and the way McCandless did? What do you make of Krakauer's subsequent efforts to amend his original account of what happened, which appears as the right hand column of text running next to his original article, and the debate that has ensued between him and other who survived this ordeal (which you may follow to going to the links at the bottom of the article)? What are the survivors arguing about? Why is it important to them?
  

• If you follow the links at the Outward Bound to the statement of the program's core values, you will find sections discussing "challenge and adventure," "character development," "learning through experience," "compassion and service," and "social and environmental responsibility." How does the curriculum at Outward Bound reflect these values? How do you think these values relate to the values that led McCandless on his odyssey?
  

• If you had a chance to go to Alaska, would you feel inclined to follow the route that McCandless took? To take photos of the bus? Of McCandless' belongings? How would you compare McCandless' relationship to the natural world with that of Tom Boettger (A Graduate Student Retraces McCandless' Steps), another amateur outdoorsman and travel writer? After reading Bottger's piece, what do you make of Krakauer's decision not to publish extended pieces of McCandless' own prose?

Questions for Connecting:

• At one point in Into the Wild, Krakauer describes McCandless as a "pilgrim," and elsewhere as someone who "possessed grand--some would say grandiose--spiritual ambitions." With Karen Armstrong in mind, would you argue that McCandless is evidence that God has a future in the 21st century? Or is McCandless proof that the mysticism Armstrong admires is ultimately destructive? Is anything to be gained by following the path that McCandless went down?

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