Well, he’d been losing weight steadily for a while when he ate the seeds. Either the seeds themselves or the mold on the seeds (he had rinsed out a Ziploc bag and kept the seeds in it and they got moldy in the damp bag) did something to his digestive system so that he couldn’t have digested food anyway, IIRC. By that time he was so weak he couldn’t really do anything about it (like leave the bus and head for a town). They think if he had been stronger to begin with he might have been able to shrug off the effects of the poison (if that’s the right word).
They found his body inside his sleeping bag on the mattress inside the bus some days later.
He may of just starved to death, he also may of gotten sick from eating the wrong wild vegetation with no trace of posion left and just the symptom… starvation.
It’s a painful movie to watch–Grizzly Man. So much stupid. So little time. Actually I remember reading that he consorted with animals in this fashion for about seventeen years before he died.
That film is definitely fascinating. I walked into it thinking, 'Hur hur hur this idiot got eaten by a BEAR! What kind of fucking dumb ass gets–" and so on. Watching the movie though— he’s literally crazy. Not a run of the mill idiot, literally insane. The fact that no one ever stopped him … I dunno. I mean, the scene where he yells at God? Link here.
Ultimately, though, I voted for Treadwell because foolishness should be graded on an age-based curve, with there being no fool like an old[er] fool – and, to be honest, there’s been very, very few celebrity-types whose ability to irritate me even compare to that once possessed by this guy. McCandless was very young, but Treadwell had 22 years on him. How he survived as long as he did with the Alaskan grizzlies is beyond me.
I voted for Treadwell, because he seems crazier and because he got another person killed as well as his own crazy self. Current frontrunner Chris McCandless put himself in a very dangerous situation, but at least he had the sense not to be palling around with 1000+ lbs predators.
I recently read Into the Wild, and it didn’t sound like McCandless’s body was tested for toxins before he was cremated. What was tested were the same types of seeds that McCandless had apparently been eating. They were not, as author Jon Krakauer had speculated, toxic. However, Krakauer came up with a second idea which is that the seeds McCandless ate had been contaminated with toxic mold. Such molds do exist but this is an untestable hypothesis as there isn’t any way to go back and check if the actual seeds McCandless ate were moldy.
The reason Krakauer is so keen on the idea that something was wrong with the seeds is that McCandless wrote in his diary about two weeks before his death that he was sick from eating these seeds. So whatever his actual cause of death, McCandless himself believed that something was wrong with the seeds he’d eaten.
I think you, and several others here, are misremembering the book. While McCandless made plenty of bad decisions in his short life, he wasn’t clueless – if he had been, he wouldn’t have survived alone in the Alaskan wilderness for nearly four months. He was eating that edible vegetation you mention, plus the small game he was able to kill. There was only a road nearby if you consider 20 miles to be “near” (the closest town was even father away), and keep in mind that he was on foot. There was also a river in the way. He’d been able to cross earlier in the year when it was partially frozen, but that was too deep and turbulent for him to manage when he attempted to hike back to the road in July.
So the problem was not that McCandless wasn’t able to find food or that he didn’t know where the road was. His problem was that the available food didn’t provide him with sufficient calories/nutrients to keep going indefinitely (or else he was poisoned by mold, but aside from Krakauer the consensus seems to be that he starved), and that when he wanted to return to civilization he was unable to get back to the road the same way he’d come. Where McCandless made a really stupid and arrogant mistake was in not getting a good map and bringing it with him in the first place. If he’d had one, he likely would have been able to find a safer place to cross the river (such places did exist) and could have continued on his way to the road while he was still in reasonably good health.
My money’s still on McCandless as the Biggest Nincompoop, although I’ll concede that Treadwell was a bigger menace. McCandless, contrary to the portrayal in Into the Wild, actually did have a map with him. It’s listed on his coroner’s report. It showed a ten mile hike from the bus to the Denali park road. Furthermore, there was a tram which crossed the supposedly impassable river just a quarter mile downstream from where McCandless tried to cross. A half mile upstream, the river was shallower & fordable. If he’d tried at all, he could have found either of those spots. I have no interest in being Grizzly Adams and I know enough that I could have gotten out of that situation (and I never would have gotten myself into it to begin with.)
He didn’t have to die. If he wasn’t actively trying to die, he could have saved himself, if he wasn’t such a raging nincompoop. It’s possible I guess that he was suicidal. But baring that, he was just criminally stupid & incompetent.
He did not “live off the land”. He was living in a man-made bus that a lot of people who were not Chris McCandless has worked to bring there. Someone who lives off the land carries in a tent or a tarp; they don’t live in a manmade structure. This is a point that just bugs me on principle.
His problem was not the lack of a map; his problem was having no idea how to survive in the wilderness. For starters, he obviously didn’t know what his caloric and nutritional needs would be, and it’s very likely that a major factor in his death was “rabbit starvation”. An active person (say, someone living like a hunter/gatherer) cannot survive on a handful of berries and lean meat - it won’t meet your nutritional needs. Anyone who’s so much as paid attention in high school health class could tell that, and anyone who’s got the slightest bit of common sense would think, “Hey, perhaps before heading off into the woods to live on my own I should read a goddamn book about what I should eat!” As far as I can tell, he seriously believed that he somehow had some magical intuitive knowledge that would protect him from reality. Turns out he didn’t.
He had a map. And a fishing pole - and gosh, look at that river nearby! And the means to start a fire and thereby create lots of smoke! And there was a fully-stocked park service cabin less than ten miles away! And easy means of crossing the river that he thought was blocking him, less than a mile from where he decided the river was an insurmountable obstacle! So he had the means to hike out, and if he wasn’t physically capable by the time he decided he wanted to leave, then he still had the means to signal for help - it’s not like he was short on material he could burn to create a nice smoky fire.
Given the above, particularly the fact that he did have a map and he did likely have the means to get past the river, there’s really only two possible conclusions: he was just an unbelievably stupid person, or he was in fact suicidal.
If it was the former: well, there you go. Sucks for his family, but they obviously didn’t try very hard to instill any common sense in him. If it was the latter: also sucks for his family, and for him - but there’s no evidence that he suffered from clinical depression or suicidal ideation. And most people who commit suicide don’t choose an incredibly slow and unpleasant way like starvation. And if he was that severely mentally ill where he did intentionally starve to death, he did a really shitty thing by leaving his body in a place in an established shelter where it was likely to be found by innocent passerby - if you’re going to kill yourself in the Alaskan wilderness, have the courtesy to go wander off to a place where scavengers can eat your body.
So, yeah. He was a nincompoop, and so is Krakauer for spreading lies about a dead kid in order to glorify what’s really nothing more than suicide by stupidity.
I didn’t say he didn’t have a map, I said he didn’t have a good map. He just had a road map, not a detailed map of the area.
*Would this have been marked on a road map, or any current map? According to the book Into the Wild the tram was at an abandoned research station and was not supposed to be open for use by the public, although people who hunted in the area did know about it.
*I’m pretty much the least outdoorsy person there is, but it doesn’t strike me as a good idea to go wandering around on the banks of a raging river hoping to stumble across a safe place to cross. If he’d known the tram was there then it would be incredibly boneheaded not to use it, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason to believe that McCandless even suspected there might be such a thing in the area. And according to Into the Wild, the river upstream might have been passable but it would have been tricky and somewhat dangerous, McCandless couldn’t have just waded across.
I’m not arguing that McCandless made only good choices here, but at the moment when he saw he couldn’t cross the river the same way he came I don’t think it was particularly stupid to turn around and go back to the shelter where he’d managed to live for several months – especially not since there was evidence that other people at least occasionally visited this bus. Given the information he possessed at the time, I can see why this seemed smarter than wandering around hoping to get lucky and find a safe way to cross the river.
Where McCandless really went wrong was months earlier, in not researching the area more carefully ahead of time and not having a good plan for how he was going to leave. That was a very, very big mistake, and ultimately cost him his life.
I didn’t say he did. It doesn’t look like anyone in this thread except for you has even used that phrase.
*And yet he did survive in the wilderness for over three months, and had previously survived in the wilderness (albeit in less harsh regions) for extended periods of time.
*Again, I said he didn’t have a good map, not that he’d never had any map at all.
*I know very little about fishing, but I do know that the mere presence of a river doesn’t mean there are going to be fish to catch.
*And was any of this marked on the map he did have? Also, as Krakauer explains in the book, that same spring/summer the cabins in the area were vandalized and the supplies were spoiled. Some suspect McCandless of doing this himself (which would certainly move him up the nincompoop scale), but there’s no evidence he ever went near them. His diary and photos suggest that he never explored in that direction at all. So it’s possible that even if McCandless had found one of the cabins it would already have been trashed by someone else and would have done him no good.
*The tram would have been a means of crossing the river if he’d known about it. He wasn’t stupid for failing to use a tram he didn’t know was there. He was stupid for going “into the wild” without a good plan for getting back from the wild, but it’s not like he was standing there staring at the tram going “Dur, what’s this for?”
*Do you have specific examples of lies Krakauer told in his book? It was my understanding that the only controversy over any of his factual claims was with regard to McCandless’s exact cause of death. For the purposes of this thread I don’t think that makes much difference, because starving to death and nearly starving and then eating something toxic seem about equal on the nincompoop scale to me. I’d place either one below thinking that grizzly bears are man’s furry friends and getting yourself eaten.
Thing is, surviving for three months in the wilderness is no big feat. Especially if you have the most important survival tool, which is shelter. The big thing that kills people in the wilderness is exposure–either hypothermia or heat stroke. You can go weeks eating just a few bugs and twigs, living off your stored reserves. You can go days without water. But you can die in a few hours from cold or heat.
So McCandless had a waterproof shelter to live in, and it was summertime. Pretty much anybody with shelter could survive for three months in the summer. That he’d lost an amazing amount of weight shows that he was able to gather very little food, and was starving. But starving to death takes a long time, especially if you are able to get a few rabbits and berries and seeds.
Thing is, human beings aren’t able to survive on their own. Even hunter-gatherers grow up in a tribe of people who teach the children how to survive, and they share food and trade tools. So expecting to wander out into the wilderness and “live off the land” without preparing yourself with knowledge and tools and supplies is essentially commiting suicide. Yes, there are people who could be dropped into the woods naked, and they’d survive. Except these are people who’ve spent their lives learning how to hunt and gather and build shelters and construct tools. But one misplaced step and you turn your ankle and can’t walk for a few weeks, and you can’t collect food, and your energy level drops and you’re caught in the rain and you’re dead. Even if you’re Les Stroud.
Wilderness survival without tools and knowledge is impossible. Even wolves and foxes have to be taught by their parents how to survive. The fewer tools you have, the more knowledge you need. So if you wander off into the hills with no supplies and no plans and no training and no backup it’s pretty much equivalent to putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger. Maybe the gun isn’t loaded, you know?
I didn’t say -you- said anything about a map. I said -Krakauer- said he didn’t have a map.
The Coroner’s report just says “road map”. The Denali Park service road was the only road around. The bus got there somehow. I’m not saying there was a marked trail, of course. It might not have been an easy hike but if a bus can drive in, a man can walk out.
Less than a mile away. If he’d looked around at all, he would have found it.
Always go downstream. Civilization is always downstream. A good idea? Well a better idea than waiting for a knight in shining in armor.
See I disagree. If he honestly thought the river was completely impassable, who did he think was going to pop in and save him if he just sat there? And following a river bank is not ‘wandering around’ - it’s the best way to find help if you’re lost in the wilderness. He could have left a note at the bus with the date and saying he needed help desperately and was moving downstream along the river bank. That might have got him attention from people visiting the bus and people on the river.
No, it wouldn’t have been easy. But the fact that he seems to have expected it all to be easy is part of why he wears the Crown of Fools in my book.
No argument there. Ugh. I wish I could dig him up and shake some sense into him. It didn’t have to go down like that.
From all I’ve read of the McCandless case and Into the Wild, there’s obviously still some controversy as to why exactly he starved to death, but I haven’t read any other substantive criticism of Krakauer’s book, let alone that the author lied.
I’ve got a copy of Into the Wild on my lap here, so all factual claims below come directly from that unless otherwise noted. I’d welcome any cites for contradictory information.
That bus didn’t drive in. It had been hauled in behind one of these guys a good 30 years before McCandless found it.
*Although I’m definitely not any kind of outdoorswoman, I was once a Girl Scout and I remember being told many times that if you run into trouble in the woods you are supposed to wait for help, and that you definitely should not try to find your own way out.
The second problem with your suggestion is that the Teklanika River is in the wilderness. I’m looking at Google Maps now and there are no signs of civilization along that river anywhere near where McCandless would have been. If he had looked at any kind of map at all he’d have known that the nearest town (Healy) was to the east, as was the nearest highway. Following the river would have taken him either north or south, and in either direction there was a whole lot of nuthin’ for a long ways. There is a town called Nenana on the river to the northeast, which I believe is downstream, but that looks to be about 50 miles away. McCandless had no reason to guess that a US Geological Survey station was much closer than that, and if he had known that the station was there he probably would also have known that it had been decommissioned years before and that no one would be there.
*It’s not clear that he was expecting to be saved when he turned back and returned to the bus. Krakauer believes that McCandless thought that he’d live in the bus a while longer and try the river again later. The water level would eventually have dropped, and McCandless must have known the river wasn’t impassable all the time because that was the way he’d come in.
McCandless made it back to the bus on July 8. His diary doesn’t indicate he was having any particular trouble over the next couple of weeks. He managed to kill and eat a lot of small game. He did note that it rained for a week straight, so if he was still planning on crossing the river he probably figured he wouldn’t have any better luck during/soon after a lengthy rainstorm. Unfortunately for McCandless, he would soon find himself physically unable to even make the attempt. On July 30 he wrote “EXTREMELY WEAK, FAULT OF POT. SEED. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP. STARVING. GREAT JEOPARDY.” Whether his problem was bad wild potato seeds or just regular starvation, McCandless did not regain his strength. A note he left on the door of the bus shows he had some hope that he might be found there, and there were plenty of signs (including dated graffiti) that other people did occasionally visit the bus. McCandless died sometime around August 19. Had he managed to live until September 6, he might have been rescued by the hunters who discovered his corpse.
*It was a two-day hike from the bus to the river, so if McCandless had returned to the bus to leave a note and then come back to the river again he’d have been hiking for six days straight. That doesn’t sound like a particularly good idea for someone who didn’t have many calories to burn, and I can understand why he wouldn’t want to go all the way back to the shelter of the bus and then immediately head back towards the river without taking a break.
*That wasn’t the impression I got from Krakauer’s book at all. McCandless seemed to want the experience to be difficult, and from things he wrote to friends before he went into the bush he apparently did realize that there was a chance he wouldn’t make it back out again: “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again…” It doesn’t seem that he seriously believed his life was in danger until some time after he failed to cross the river, but he did at least on some level know going in that he might die.
I want to be clear here that I’m not one of those people who consider Chris McCandless to be some kind of a modern folk hero. (It takes a few seconds on Google to find people saying things like “this guy is my hero he inspired me now i want to go live in alaska i also want to hike the stampede trail! and see the bus”. :smack:) McCandless did some very, very stupid things, and although he had experience “roughing it” he fatally overestimated his abilities when it came to surviving in the Alaskan bush. But several people here seem to think he was a lot dumber than he was because they misremember or were misinformed about the facts surrounding his death.
If one knows the facts and still considers McCandless the biggest nincompoop then fine, it’s a matter of opinion. I still think Treadwell was a lot worse, though. Thinking it’s a good idea to rough it for a few months in the Alaskan wilderness strikes me as at least marginally less deluded than thinking it’s a good idea to try to befriend a bunch of grizzly bears. I also rate Treadwell as more of a nincompoop because the manner of his death served to undermine his entire cause. McCandless went to Alaska for purely personal reasons, he wasn’t trying to convince the world that what he was doing was safe. But after spending years trying to protect the grizzlies and convince others that they’re not so scary or dangerous, Treadwell became the most famous case of death-by-grizzly. Oh yeah, and his death indirectly resulted in two bears being shot and killed by park rangers.