Death of Chris McCandless - Starving in the Alaskan Wilderness

[Music] Hello and welcome to When It Goes Wrong, the podcast exploring disasters, accidents, and times when everything falls apart. I'm Jasmine, your host, and on this episode we'll be discussing the death of Chris McAnlis in the Alaskan Forest in 1992. So there might be a bit of a different episode to some of the other ones, but it's a case I really wanted to cover as I do find it really interesting, and it's captured the interest of a lot of people around the world, so I think it is something that's hopefully a good lesson for you. A lot of what I'm going to talk about derives from John Crackauer's book, which is called Into the Wild. I highly recommend it. It's a really great read, not very long, so if you want a non-fiction read, do pick it up and give it a read. And it's also been made into a film which Jean-Pain directed, I think it was 2007, so that's also worth a watch. So most of it is based on that, but I'll put all my sources and other bits and pieces in the show notes as always. I'm going to talk a bit about Chris and his life up to when he went to Alaska, and then what I happened from Alaska onwards. I always want to call him Chris McAnlis. I don't know why. When I see the word, that's how my brain reads them, but I will try my best to make sure I don't do them. So Chris was born in California to Billy and Walt, and he had a younger sister called Karine. And so by all standards, they had a pretty normal childhood, so the family moved to Virginia when Walt got a job working with NASA. And Chris went to school. He headed up the local cross-country running team, generally had a pretty good childhood, pretty good school life, made friends, all of that kind of good stuff. And he went off to college once he graduated as well. But with all that said, there were a few things brewing below the surface. And Chris really didn't have a great relationship with his parents around that time. So while his father had actually been married to someone else when he met Billy, who was his secretary. And Walt basically kept the two families going throughout a lot of their childhood. So he kept his first wife and then basically went and started a second life with his secretary and they had children and all of that type of thing. And when Chris discovered this, he discovered this when he was quite a bit older, he was very upset by it and very, it really fractured his relationship with his father. And that's quite key to Chris' personality, I think, because he was very, you see a lot in his writing, he values truth above all else. And so this really was a black mark against his family. A few years ago from now, so I think it was about 2015, Korean, Chris's sister wrote a book and she alleges in the book that actually alongside that there was a lot of domestic violence in the family when they were both growing up, both from Walt to Billy but also from Walt to the children. And so again, that gives a little bit of insight into why Chris was very not connected to his family and not connected to his parents as we will see as we go on. So once Chris finished college, he donated all his money to Oxfam and basically headed out on the road. So he donated like thousands and thousands of dollars. And then he basically just started to totally shun all concepts in normal life. He wanted to live on the road, he didn't want to earn money or keep money, he just wanted to go explore, find what was real and get away from it all. So and at that point when he did initially leave that, at that point he spoke with Karina about divorcing his parents and once he did leave after college he totally stopped speaking to them at that point. So he initially started off in a yellow datson. So he started off in the car he had but he did a kind of questionable trip to California and basically drove into a desert, the desert then flooded, the car got flooded. He instead of going and asking for help, he basically just abandoned it, took the plates off it and abandoned it because he was worried that the police would book it for not having insurance or something silly. So he abandoned the car and then carried on the rest of his journey off on foot. And he did a lot of hitchhiking, he did a lot of travelling by freight train, kind of hitching onto trains and using that to travel best distances across the country. And he got pretty far, you know, he got around a lot of Southern United States and he went down into Mexico as well, did a lot of canoeing on that trip. And he when he was on this journey, he took a new name so he started calling with himself Alexander Super Tramp who was his alter ego on the road, presumably because he wanted to be a super tramp. So be able to live on the road and keep everything going that way. So throughout his travels, so he was travelling for a couple of years. He did make a few friends. So he repeatedly went back to work in a grain elevator. I did look up what a grain elevator was but I think it's actually just something where you elevate grain into like a silo, vaguely interesting. So anyway, he repeatedly went back to work in a grain elevator in Carthage, which is in South Dakota. After he made friends with a man they called Wayne Westberg and Wayne was really fond of Chris at the time and explains that Chris really just wanted to go and live his life, you know, rebuild himself, find what he wanted to do and really go and and you know, discover the beauty out there. And so alongside that, he was totally obsessed with Alaska. So Chris was determined to get to Alaska, really wanted to go. He really wanted to be fully off the grid, live out in the country there with, you know, no other people, no connection to real life, just totally get off the grid. And Chris, when he was there, he, in South Dakota, he made friends with Wayne's mum and girlfriend and one of them said a good quote about him. They said there was something fascinating about him. He was hungry to learn about things. Unlike most of us, he was the sort of person who insisted on living out his beliefs. And I think that's that sums him up pretty well. He was very keen on, on really showing and fully embodying what he wanted to do. So after talking for months about Alaska, whilst he was doing his travels across the country, Chris headed back to Carthage, back to the grain elevator, to make some more money before taking the trip. So he knew he knew he needed some new equipment, that type of thing. So he went and started work there for a while. And but he was determined to go to Alaska at the end of April and nothing could commit some otherwise. So Wayne really wanted him to stay and continue working for a while, but Chris just would not have it Wayne offered to fly him up there. If he would just stay around and work for a bit longer, but again, Chris was just totally unwilling. He wanted to go by himself, but he also really wanted to hitchhike, hitchhike was a part of the whole plan and something he really didn't want to change. So Chris departed north Dakota, sorry, south Dakota, and hit the road. And he managed to do pretty well getting up to Alaska. So he managed to pick up rides pretty consistently at that point, which was very good because the road is kind of notorious for not being great for hitchhikers. And so he made it a fair banks, which is a city in Alaska, where he got dropped off. And at that point he stocked up on supplies. So he bought a £10 bar of rice, a semi-automatic rifle with 400 grounds. He also had 10 bucks with him and one of them was quite poor and it was about what plants could be eaten in the area. So yeah, so what all the different like roots and berries and seeds and all that kind of thing were around there. So he had that and then he also bought some camping equipment. Master was in Fairbanks, he sent some postcards to Wayne to some of his other friends, saying that he got there and that he was about to head off into the wild. So when he was ready to go, he went back to the road and he started hitchhiking out of Fairbanks to the wilderness. And he was picked up by an engineer called Jim Gallian and Jim initially thought he was just another kind of crazy hiker who wanted to get off the grid. But his opinion changed in the two-hour drive that they took and Jim really thought that he was quite thoughtful, quite intelligent. But Jim was worried about Chris. He was especially worried about just his general lack of equipment for Alaska. It might have been enough to get him, keep him going down in America but up there you need a lot more. He was worried about the fact that Chris didn't have a map. He didn't have any proper waterproof clothing. And so Jim actually offered to take Chris to a store to buy this type of equipment to make sure that he was okay but Chris totally refused, said that no, he didn't need it, he knew what he was doing. The only thing that Chris did agree to take from Jim was a big pair of waterproof boots and Jim's lunch, so he just took his sandwiches from him to feel all I'm on his journey. And so Jim then dropped Chris. He dropped him at the start of a trail called the Stampede Trail, which was in Denali National Park. And at that point, Jim snapped a photo of Chris, which is the last photo that was taken by someone else of him, and then Chris turned around and walked out into the wild. Chris was now in Denali National Park. He walked about 20 miles from the road and came across an abandoned bus. So at this point in order for him to get to where the bus was, he had forwarded two rivers, which becomes important. And both of them were pretty small at the time. They were partially frozen. It was still April, so there wasn't a huge melt at that point. So he was able to cross those rivers relatively easily and had made it to this bus. And the bus was one where a mining company had used it previously. So the trail that he was on used to be a mining trail had mining companies around it. Their mining company had several buses, some of them were removed. But for some reason this bus was left behind, maybe had something wrong with it. And so it just been kind of abandoned there. And it turned into a bit of a landmark, you know, as hikers and hunters and all that walked through the area that would stop and see the bus. In the bus, there was a small bed, there was a wood burning stove, and you know, just shelter or shelter, obviously from the outdoors. Originally Chris carried on past the bus, so continued walking outwards. But for some reason, which we don't really know, he decided to turn around and make his permanent camp in the buses of base. Might have just been that the way wasn't accessible, or he just quite fancy day. The bus was in like quite an open field with lots of space, and close enough to all of the amenities that he would need. So from there, Chris started hunting, so he wanted to fully vent for himself and live off the land. And he was pretty successful at hunting, actually, so he shot squirrels, pork pines and different birds like geese. He continued to forage successfully using his book as a guide. And at one point he even managed to shoot and kill a moose. Initially he saw this, there was like a real success to kill this moose, but then he didn't really know what to do with the amount of meat that the moose had. And so he did try and smoke it, but the smoking just didn't work. And then he basically all of it spoiled. And then following that, he's just really regretted catching it because he just thought it was such a way that he killed this moose, and then all of the meat that he had was just left to the flies and the mosquitoes. And actually I was watching another documentary on Alaska yesterday, and the amount of flies, mosquitoes that are there, was just insane. I guess of your, you know, at that latitude, like in I know in Scotland, just the bugs. The bugs, it looks so idyllic, and then you just see them just totally covered in them. Not very enjoyable. Anyway, so he was doing pretty well, was Ian well, he was actually, I think one of the reasons this story is very interesting was that he documented a lot of this trip. So he documented it in two ways. He had a very short type diary in the back of one of his books, and it basically just had like the number of days they'd been there, and then usually like one, two, a handful of words to explain what the day was. So, you know, on bus day, just as found bus, for example. So pretty light, but helped to explain some of what he was going through. He also took a lot of photos, and I think one of the important things here is that he managed to take a lot of self-portraits, which obviously this was well before the age of the selfie. So he used a a timer and set it up in his backpack, and then would take these self-portraits of him with either like the things he'd killed or just soon with a bus, and I think the photos are quite iconic, and quite they really do draw you in into what he was doing and how he was surviving. So three months after he arrived at the bus, Chris started to prepare to go back. So he wrote in his diary that was preparing to go back. He wrote some lists about what he needed to do before he goes back. He took another self-portrait of him shaved, ready to go, but it soon became an issue. So on his hike out, those two rivers that he had crossed on the way in were now huge. So with the summer, with the melting of the ice throughout the National Park, the river had swallowing to, it was chest high, it was pretty huge across, and it was really fast-flowing, so it really couldn't be easily crossed, especially. Bikress, who wasn't a particularly strong swimmer. He turned around at that point and went back to the bus, and he noted in his diary for that day, disaster, rained in, river looked impossible, lonely, scared. And that's the most he's ever said really about his emotions at that point, so clearly it was quite an impact to him the fact that he couldn't leave. And the real sad bit about this is that if so there was a river crossing actually really close to where he was drawn across. So there was a river crossing about 800 meters south from where he was based, which had been built as part of all the mining work, but because he didn't have a map and he didn't have any information, he just wasn't aware of it. If he had a map or if he'd just walked south from where he was, he would have been able to easily cross across the river. He then, so he went back to the bus, he didn't ever try and walk out again, even though in the months that followed, in the time that followed, the temperatures were dropping pretty rapidly, so you would think that the rivers should decrease in size and should start to freeze up again. On the 30th of July then, a diary enters some more insight into what happens, so he writes in his diary then extremely weak fault of pot seed, which we're assuming is potato, much trouble just to stand up starving great jeopardy. So it indicates by the 30th of July that he is getting into some trouble. Up until this point, he has been pretty successful, he's been eating a lot, you know, had no major health issues that we've been aware of at that point clearly something has turned, something has changed from then on. So he's clearly from that point, deteriorates pretty quickly and it seems that he knew that he wasn't well, he knew that he wasn't really going to be rescued or anything that was going to happen, so he knew it's going to die. He actually took a final self-portrait and in the self-portrait he's very thin, he's smiling really broadly, it's a nice photo and he's holding a sign saying, "I have had a happy life and thank the Lord, goodbye and may God bless all." And so from then on, his last diary entry was on day 107 where he sent, simply said, beautiful blueberries and then on days 108 to 112, there were no words just a slash basically next to the number and then from 113 onwards there are no more entries. [Music] On September the 6th, so just a few weeks later, a group of hunters came across the bus and when they approached the bus they saw a sign on the door and the sign on the door said, "Attention, possible visitors, SOS, I need your help. I'm injured near death and too weak to hike out. I'm all alone, this is no joke. In the name of God please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank you, Christmas Analyst August question mark." So he put that sign on the door clearly at some point when he had been trying to find food, but sadly the hunters would go inside and they would find Chris who was dead still in his sleeping bag. So just taking a bit of a wider angle now in into the wild in the book, John mentions other similar stories to Chris, including his own. So stories of young men who basically wanted to get away from civilization, explore the wild, love off the land, all of that type of thing. And there was another tragic tale which he mentions which I wanted to mention briefly here to show that this isn't an isolated incident and that the Alaskan wildlife, you know, can be very very difficult. So Karl McCun was an American wildlife photographer and he had wanted to explore the Alaskan wilderness and wanted to spend some time alone. So in March 1981 he got a bush pilot to drop him off in Alaska and he took a lot of supplies at that point, thousands and thousands of kilos of supplies, hundreds of rolls of film and he took two rifles in a shotgun. And when he first got there, he initially, as soon as he got there, he just like threw a load of bullets in the river because he just thought he wouldn't need them and he thought he looked silly with a bite because he had too many. And so Karl had a good summer, he took lots of photos, spent time out in nature, but it became clear at some point that he thought he was relatively sure that he had. but he hadn't confirmed the booking with the pilot to actually come back and get him. So he thought he was going to get picked up in August, but he clearly hadn't actually communicated that with anyone. So as it passed August, he came to realise he hadn't been clear enough, and that by mid-August, no one was coming. So he started hunting at that point to try and keep himself going, seemed to be relatively successful with it. One really tragic bit of this story is that a plane actually did fly over his camp, so they just happened to be someone out in the bush and a plane did fly over the camp, and he thought he was rescued and that help would be coming. And so at the time, he was so excited that he was like punching the air, and then the pilot did a few loops around and came back. But when he looked around, Chris was like, sorry not Chris, Carl was like, oh yeah, I'm being rescued, cool, I'll go and start packing. And so it was only later when no one else came, that he looked it up, and he realised when he was punching the air, that's actually assigned to me, and I'm okay and don't need help. And then as he headed inside by the time he came around the third time, the pilot just assumed he's fine, he's gone back in, you know, no urgency. Did he think he's so sad? So at this point, he did, Carl did consider trying to walk out, but he was too weak. And another tragic thing about this one, which is kind of similar to Chris, is that there was a heartwood supplies only a few miles away from where Carl was staying. And the park team were pretty sure he was aware of it, because they had talked about it before he went into the bush. But for some reason, he never went to this heart, which had all of the supplies in it. By early December, Carl had run out of food, he decided to use all of his remaining fuel, and built him a fire, and then he committed suicide by shooting himself. And so his body and diaries and photos were found after his friends were alerted by him not returning by February, and they sent off to look for him. So again, like, there's a really other tragic story, which just shows that there is this pull to the wild, but it's very much not an isolated incident that a lot of people do go out there and don't take care of themselves and don't plan it in the way that you need to, and tragedy strikes again and again. So going back to Chris, there's been a bit of a debate since his death, whether he died from starvation, so just about that he couldn't kill and find enough food, or whether something else happened as part of it. And this really, this debate goes back to like a fundamental thing that some people think that Chris was like a free spirit and went after find himself and was doing a really great thing. And others just seeing him as like a bit of an idiot, basically, just someone that wasn't prepared that didn't look after himself, that didn't look after the wild, that had no right to be going out there and doing this and wasting those resources. And I think that's where the argument comes in. The people that think he was just a waster, basically, think they probably starved and just wasn't able to sustain himself, whereas those who see what he did as being quite noble and quite inspirational really want to dig in more and really understand why did he die? Why did he kind of so rapidly go downhill when he was, you know, up until that point, he had done more than three months in the wild, totally fine. So how did he die within a very short period of time? And there was a few theories. So the first one was around rabbit, something called rabbit starvation. And so this is a scenario where a human basically eats too much lean protein, which is why it's called rabbit starvation because rabbits are very lean meat. So if a human tries to just survive on lean protein, they just can't get all of the nutrients they need from it. So, you know, as humans, we need protein, fat carbs. And so if you just ate protein forever, you just won't get all of the nutrients you need. And so even though you're eating, you're not fixing the starvation problem, you're still, you still are technically starving. One of the other theories was around something called swan-sononine poisoning, which was found in seeds. So it became clear from the photos that Chris relied on seeds more for food as time went on. So he would forage for for seeds and then eat them. And as you might remember earlier, he mentioned in his diary around the pot seeds, potato seeds, making him ill. So we do think he was eating a lot of seeds. And there was a possibility that some of the seeds contained that swan-sononine. That is just a toxin that can be found in some seeds just due to the time of year and mold and all of that type of thing. But that compound causes poisoning basically, and it stops the body being able to absorb nutrients. So even if Chris was still eating and he was still able to consume all of the nutrients he needed, that type of poisoning would mean that he just would still be effectively starving. So he would still be getting weaker and weaker as he goes. So that was it was one of them. The next one was around something very similar thing where he was being poisoned again by something in the seeds that was causing the impact. But in this one, they think potentially he had a condition called lathirism. Lathirism. And lathirism would, by eating a lot of the toxin lathirism happens. And lathirism is basically where your body again starts to shut down. And it results in paralysis. So it basically stops the legs working and paralyzes you slowly. And that is potentially something that could have been happening to him because he does say earlier that he was having those problems standing. So what this would mean was that he was very weak and would really struggle to get out there and to do all of the hunting and gathering that he needed to do. So those were the poisoning theories. There are a few other theories out there that he was injured in some other way. Based on the note that says he was injured and some of the photos, some people think that maybe he'd really hurt his arm and dislocated his shoulder. But there's no mention of it anywhere in the diurean. It's not heard of it anywhere else where. And then the other theory that I said around starvation. So I think from my point of view, probably one of the poisoning ones makes the most sense because of the rapid deterioration that he had. And because he was like, like we said, he had been out there for a reasonable amount of time by that point. So I would have thought that if he was going to die from starvation, it would have happened sooner. But even if it was poisoning that caused his death and not starvation, I think he still made a lot of problematic choices and still made a lot of errors in his trip. And I have no issue with wanting to get off the grid and do all of that kind of thing. And understand that people have that call. But I think there is a way to meet nature and work with nature in a way that doesn't impact nature itself but also keeps you safe and stops you from having any issues. But I think potentially to people that do want to do that, being off the grid is such a big part of it. And if you were to take a map and radio and all that kind of thing, maybe it wouldn't give you the fulfillment that they were looking for. So I do go a bit back and forth as to whether I think what he did was a good idea or not. But I think that it made sense to him and it made sense based on his background and his character what he did. So moving on then into what we learnt from this one. So this is pretty similar to what we talked about when I walked from the LaZanne and Chris Kremers podcast for your episode to go. So the same things about trying to be said. If like I said, I think there's basic safety mechanisms which he could have done, which would have saved him. So having a map, you know, taking a compass, just having some form of navigation equipment. And like I say, I understand that people want to get off the grid. But what's wrong with just having a map, right? It just seems kind of common sense to take basic survival equipment with you. Also follow the laws. So what everything it did was against. The law should not have been coming in the park. I didn't have licenses for anything. He would just, you know, totally rebelled against everything. So, you know, follow the law if you are off camping or hiking and anything like that. And like I said, we're about in the last episode, let someone know where you're going and let someone know when you're planning on returning. And what should happen if you don't return by a certain date? What should go on? And then that's especially true in like the Carl story because Carl told his family. He said, like, oh, I don't worry if I'm not backed by whatever date I might have just decided to stay a bit longer. And that's why his family waited so long to raise alarm and get the pilots to go back and look for him. But if he had said, you know, if I'm not backed by September, something's gone wrong. Come and look for me. Then he would still be alive. And I just think it's that it's those really basic principles which I think we need to do no matter how much you want to get away from everything. So yeah, I would be really interested to hear from you and what you think of this story, especially if you've read a little bit more into it and in the book and stuff. Did you think what he did was this kind of noble pursuit or do you think that you're going to be able to get away from the whole thing? that he was just being stupid and being a young man and not looking after himself and going off the rails. I'd be very keen to hear what you think. So like I mentioned earlier in terms of key sources into the wild book, it's really good. I also recommend his other book, "Inth of the Nair", which I'm hoping to do another episode on at some point in future. I also recommend that movie. There is another good documentary which is called "Return to the Wild", and that's a documentary. I found it on YouTube eventually and it follows Corinne. So it's quite a lot later, but it talks about Corinne in a book and the revelations that they made and they visit the bus and you can see the habitat and the area that he was in, which I think really helps bring it to life a bit more, seeing the rivers, that type of thing. And seeing the photos, if you just google for Christmas Mechanless, you'll see, and I think I've got a link to it in the sources as well, you'll see different, all the photos that he took, especially the self-portraits and I think the self-portraits are very interesting and definitely worth a look at. So yeah, thank you very much for listening. Back to the normal things that I say at the end. So please do keep in touch. So please do follow me on Instagram when it goes wrong pod and on Twitter it goes wrong pod. Do drop me an email with your thoughts. I'd be very keen to hear from you and you can email me on when it goes wrong [email protected]. Definitely let me know if you have any future episode ideas. And the same as one of the last, one of the most recent episodes, if anything, in this episode has triggered anything or you know, we're in a hard time at the moment. So if you do need support, I'll leave links to support mechanisms that are available to you in the show notes as well.