Chris McCandless: The Stampede Trail, Bus 142 and the Teklanika River

Chris McCandless was born in El Segundo, California, in February 1968 and grew up in Annandale, a comfortable suburb of Washington, D.C. He ran cross-country at high school and went on to Emory University in Atlanta, graduating in May 1990 with a degree in history and anthropology. Within weeks he had given more than US$24,000, his college fund, to Oxfam.

That summer he drove west in a yellow Datsun. When a flash flood near Lake Mead disabled the car, he left it, burned some of his remaining cash and carried on with a pack and his thumb. For the next two years he moved around the American West under the name Alexander Supertramp: a grain elevator job in Carthage, South Dakota, a canoe trip down the Colorado River into Mexico, months among the drifters at the Slabs in southern California. Some of the people he met along the way stayed in touch with him by letter until the end. His sister Carine’s memoir, discussed in The Wild Truth and the family behind Into the Wild, explains why he cut himself off from his parents so completely during those years.

The road trip has its own literature. Anyone who has followed Route 66 across the American West will recognise the appeal of the long, empty highway to someone trying to start over.

Alaska was always the goal.

In April 1992 he hitchhiked north from South Dakota to Fairbanks, carrying little that suited a northern spring.

The Stampede Trail began as a mining route in the 1930s. In 1961 a construction company working to upgrade it into a road hauled in an old Fairbanks city bus, a 1946 International Harvester, as a camp for its crew. The road was never finished. When the work stopped, the bus stayed where it stood, beside the Sushana River, a long day’s walk beyond the end of the drivable road.

For the next thirty years Bus 142 served as an emergency shelter for hunters, trappers and dog mushers. It had a bed frame, a stove and little else. McCandless reached it in early May 1992 and decided to stay.

The country around it is boreal forest and muskeg: black spruce, willow and alder, braided gravel rivers and, to the south, the foothills of the Alaska Range. In early spring it is still frozen. By June the bugs are out and the ground is soft underfoot, and moose, caribou and bears move through the valleys.

The Teklanika

The trail crosses two significant rivers on the way to the bus, the Savage and the Teklanika. The Teklanika is the dangerous one. It drains glaciers in the Alaska Range, and its volume swings with the season and the weather: low and braided in spring, a fast, cold, silt-grey torrent during the summer melt or after heavy rain.

McCandless crossed it in late April without much trouble. In early July, after about two months at the bus, he packed up and walked back towards the road. When he reached the Teklanika it was in full flood. He did not attempt it. He returned to the bus, and his journal suggests he intended to wait for the water to drop.

He did not know that a hand-operated cable crossing spanned the river a short distance downstream. It was not on his map, and it could not be seen from where he stood.

The journal he kept on the bus is brief, a sentence or two per day. The entries grow shorter through July and August. His last dated entry, on day 107, reads “Beautiful blue berries”. At some point he wrote a note asking for help and pinned it to the bus door. The moose hunters who reached the bus on 6 September found the note and, inside, his body in a sleeping bag. He weighed about 30 kilograms.

The official cause of death was starvation. Jon Krakauer, whose January 1993 article in Outside magazine first told the story, has argued that toxic compounds in the seeds of the wild potato plant, Hedysarum alpinum, which McCandless was gathering, helped weaken him. A 2015 paper Krakauer co-wrote pointed to the amino acid L-canavanine; an earlier argument by Ronald Hamilton focused on a different neurotoxin, ODAP. None of this has been settled, and some Alaskans continue to argue that the simpler explanation, too few calories and too little preparation, is the right one.

Krakauer expanded the article into the book Into the Wild in 1996. Sean Penn’s film followed in 2007, and after it the trickle of visitors to the bus turned into a steady flow. People came from every continent. They left notes, photos and journals inside, signed the walls, slept on the bed frame where McCandless died. For some it was a tribute; for others it resembled the long tradition of travelling to sacred places, with a bus standing in for a shrine.

Many of these visitors were poorly prepared for the walk. The irony was not lost on people in Healy. Local search and rescue teams and Alaska State Troopers were called out again and again, most often for hikers stranded on the wrong side of the Teklanika when the water rose. The Alaska Department of Natural Resources later counted 15 bus-related search and rescue operations by the state between 2009 and 2017 alone.

Two of those trips ended in death. In August 2010 a 28-year-old Swiss hiker, Claire Ackermann, drowned while crossing the Teklanika with a French friend. The two had tied into ropes left across the river by earlier hikers; both lost their footing and the ropes held them under. He cut himself free and pulled her out about 300 yards downstream, too late. In July 2019 a 24-year-old woman from Belarus, married less than a month, was swept away in high water while crossing with her husband on the way back from the bus. He pulled her body from the river downstream.

The near-misses between those two deaths were frequent. In May 2013 three German hikers trying to reach the bus had to be rescued, and in 2016 two Americans who made it to the bus were swept downstream on their return before getting out of the water. Each case followed the same pattern as McCandless’s own: an easy crossing on the way in, an impossible one on the way out.

Not everyone in Alaska wanted the bus gone. Some saw it as part of the state’s history and argued that people are entitled to take their own risks. But the rescues put volunteers and troopers in danger too, and the second death settled the argument for the authorities.

On 18 June 2020 a CH-47 Chinook helicopter of the Alaska Army National Guard hovered over the bus while soldiers rigged it with straps. The Department of Natural Resources had requested the removal, citing public safety. The bus was flown to Healy, set down on a flatbed and later driven to Fairbanks.

In September 2020 the University of Alaska Museum of the North at the University of Alaska Fairbanks announced it would become the bus’s permanent home. Professional conservators assessed it in 2021 and completed the main treatment between January and April 2023, stabilising rust, paint and the graffiti left by thirty years of visitors. A foundation set up in Chris McCandless’s memory gave US$125,000 in 2024 towards an open-air pavilion.

As of September 2026 the bus was still in storage on the university campus in Fairbanks, according to local reporting on a new US$300,000 federal grant for the exhibit. The museum plans to show it outdoors in a wooded area north of the museum building, beside the parking lot, with a soft opening at the end of summer 2027 and a full opening in summer 2028. Around US$100,000 was still needed for power, lighting and security cameras.

That means the place to see Bus 142 is Fairbanks, not the Stampede Trail. The trail itself still exists, and the Teklanika still floods every summer. If you are drawn to wild northern rivers for their own sake, you might do better on a guided trip, in Alaska or as far away as the fiords of New Zealand’s south, where the walking routes of Fiordland are bridged, hutted and patrolled.

The bus sat in the bush for 59 years, from 1961 to 2020. The Chris McCandless story has outlasted it there, and its last stop will be a stand of trees on a university campus, a few metres from the car park.