(Even, if he had eaten the wrong plant, some food plants experts say wild sweet pea is not in fact very poisonous.)Īfter McCandless wrote in his cryptic keyword diary on Day 90: “EXTREMELY WEAK. “Wild sweet pea looks so much like wild potato that even expert botanists sometimes have trouble telling the species apart,” wrote Krakauer in the Outside magazine article.Īs depicted in the movie, Chris McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) is seen studying the leaves of the plants he has been eating and discovering his mistake, to his horror.īut in the book Into the Wild, Krakauer said he had got it wrong, and that Chris McCandless did not make the mistake of mis-identification and that he was not as reckless, naive and possibly even suicidal as some claim. It is worth remembering that Jon Krakaeur first came to the conclusion – in the article he wrote for Outside magazine – that Chris McCandless had most likely died when he mistook the supposedly poisonous wild sweet pea (Hedysarum mackenzeii ) for the edible wild potato (Hedysarum alpinum) and ate its seeds.

What I discovered is that a lot has happened – both in terms of conjecture and scientific research – to try to come to a definitive answer. The debate over why McCandless perished, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering, and occasionally flaring, for more than two decades now. That fascination has never died, and I found myself, upon re-reading the book this year, scouring the internet again for clues and answers.Īs Jon Krakauer himself wrote in an article for New Yorker magazine in 2013: I was one of those people who became fascinated about Chris McCandless, in particular his tragic end and the mystery about what actually killed in. The journal McCandless kept at the back of a book on edible plants

Not all are hero worshippers indeed Krakauer has received plenty of criticism for – in the view of some harsh critics – glorifying the death of a naïve and arrogant young man who thought he could tame nature, but who ended up succumbing to it in the most terrible way. People have become obsessed with his short, but adventurous life, his unique philosophical view of the world and his tragic death. There’s also hundreds of articles online discussing the book, film and McCandless’s adventures and final misadventure most of them captured on an excellent website, Sean Penn’s haunting film came out in 2008.Īlongside these mainstream retellings, hundreds of videos have appeared on YouTube about McCandless including documentaries, tributes and amateur investigations. He then expanded that article into a book which became a 1996 bestseller. McCandless wished to follow in the footsteps of his literary heroes Henry Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Jack London and test himself with a final adventure in the wilds of Alaska.Ĭhris McCandless – at Bus 142, in the year he diedĪfter the first Associated Press article was published on September 13, 1992, about a body discovered by moose hunters in a remote camp, accompanied by a diary and a final plea for help, Jon Krakauer wrote a 5000 word article for Outside magazine “Death of an Innocent” based on interviews with people who had met McCandless on his wanderings. People around the world have become fascinated by the story of a well-educated and intense young man from an affluent West Virginia family who gave away all his savings, burnt his money and credit cards and abandoned his car to tramp around America for two years on a rite of passage “to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution”. Having recently re-read the book whilst on holiday, it occurred to me that back then in 1997, I was the same age – 24 – as Chris McCandless when he died, alone, in a rusting bus, on the Stampede Trail overlooking the Teklinaka River. I first read Krakauer’s beautifully written investigation of the short, but eventful life of idealistic adventurer Chris McCandless – who died in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992 – whilst travelling around the south and Midwest of America on an Amtrak pass in the late summer of 1997. The film adaptation by Sean Penn was also superb. One of my all-time favourite books is Into the Wild by journalist Jon Krakauer.

Into the wild book chris mccandless