98 Fun Facts About Into the Wild

McCandless gave the roughly $24,000 left in his college fund after Emory to which charity?

Oxfam got all of it, a college fund of more than $24,000, and McCandless then lived as a drifter, taking work as a farm-hand or restaurant food preparer only when he had to.

McCandless, who abandoned his car and burned his cash, travelled under which alias?

Alexander Supertramp, usually shortened to 'Alex', was all most people he met knew, so his body went unidentified until an old employer dug out a tax form he had filled in with his real details.

A flash flood disabled McCandless's Datsun, and he abandoned the car beside which desert reservoir?

Lake Mead rangers came across the abandoned Datsun a few months later and got it running again, and it was then put to work as an undercover vehicle.

In Penn's film, McCandless leaves Carthage after his boss Wayne Westerberg is arrested for what?

Satellite piracy puts Westerberg behind bars in the film, so McCandless moves on and takes a kayak down the Colorado River, ignoring the rangers who tell him he needs a permit.

Shooting which animal did McCandless call 'one of the greatest tragedies of my life' in his journal?

A moose, shot on June 9, 1992, fed him for only a few days: he failed to preserve the meat, it spoiled, and he wrote 'I now wish I had never shot the moose.'

Where did bus 142, McCandless's Stampede Trail refuge, find a permanent home in September 2020?

The University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks was named its permanent home on September 24, 2020, and is conserving the bus for outdoor display; the one seen in the 2007 film was a replica.

Which actor plays Chris McCandless in Sean Penn's 2007 film of Into the Wild?

Emile Hirsch lost 40 pounds to play the starving final weeks, and Roger Ebert called his performance 'hypnotic', adding: 'It is great acting, and more than acting.'

Which Eddie Vedder song from Into the Wild won the 2008 Golden Globe for Best Original Song?

'Guaranteed' closes the soundtrack album, and Vedder has said its lines about the one person who might have kept the wanderer at home were written for McCandless's sister, Carine.

McCandless's last self-portrait shows him waving and holding a note that opens with which words?

I have had a happy life and thank the Lord, the farewell note reads; a second note, taped to the bus door, had begged anyone passing for help, saying he was near death and too weak to hike out.

Which actress plays Tracy Tatro, the teenage singer whose advances McCandless gently turns down?

Kristen Stewart took the small part the year before Twilight made her famous, and in the film McCandless declines Tracy's advances because she is still a minor.

McCandless walked onto the Stampede Trail with a ten-pound bag of which staple?

Rice, a .22 rifle with a few boxes of rounds, a camera and a guidebook to the region's edible plants were about all he carried, and the electrician who dropped him off tried hard to talk him out of going.

Which electrician, the last to see McCandless alive, drove him from Fairbanks to the trailhead?

Jim Gallien gave him the lift on April 28, 1992, saw the light pack and meagre rations, and offered to detour to Anchorage to buy him proper gear; McCandless declined.

Why did Alaska's agencies remove the Stampede Trail bus in June 2020?

Hikers kept dying or needing rescue at the river crossing on the way in, at least 15 rescues and two drownings, so an Alaska Army National Guard training mission flew the bus out.

Which Army helicopter carried the Stampede Trail bus out to Healy in June 2020?

A CH-47 Chinook lifted the 1946 bus out on a National Guard training mission and set it down in Healy, and the state then kept it at an undisclosed secure site while it decided where the relic should go.

Who discovered McCandless's body inside the Stampede Trail bus on September 6, 1992?

Hunters found the body, with a plea for help taped to the bus door, about nineteen days after his death; it weighed 67 pounds, and the coroner gave the probable cause as starvation.

What did McCandless's July 30 journal entry, beginning 'Extremely Weak', blame for his decline?

Wild potato seeds, from the plant Hedysarum alpinum, became the centre of Krakauer's theories, which shifted from a look-alike sweet pea to a mould to a measured toxin over two decades.

Krakauer's 2015 study found what kind of toxin in the Hedysarum alpinum McCandless ate?

Amino acid: the lab found L-canavanine, an antimetabolite toxic to mammals. Krakauer had missed it for years because he, like earlier testers, had been looking for a toxic alkaloid.

McCandless's diet of very lean game risked 'rabbit starvation', a form of what?

Protein poisoning sets in when nearly all of a diet's calories come from lean meat: with no fat to burn, the body is overloaded with protein and wastes away even on a full stomach.

Which river, swollen by snowmelt each summer, does Krakauer's book call McCandless's 'Rubicon'?

The Teklanika had been an easy crossing when he walked in that April; by July it was too deep and fast to ford, so he turned back to the bus, where he died the following month.

Which actress plays Jan Burres, half of the hippie couple who twice take in McCandless?

Catherine Keener's Jan is drifting apart from her partner Rainey when the pair pick McCandless up, and his company helps them rekindle things before they meet him again in the desert that December.

Which actor earned an Oscar nomination at 82 as Ron Franz, the widower who befriends McCandless?

Hal Holbrook, known for decades for the one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!, plays the lonely widower who teaches McCandless leatherwork; together they tool a belt that records the young man's travels.

What does Ron Franz, the widowed leather worker, offer as McCandless sets off for Alaska?

Adopt him as his grandchild is the offer from a man who lost his family in a car accident while serving in the army, and Franz hands over his old camping gear as well.

Which actress plays Carine McCandless, Chris's younger sister, in Penn's film?

Jena Malone, who had acted opposite the film's leading man five years earlier in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, plays the sister he is close to and yet leaves without a word about his plans.

Which Wedding Crashers star plays Wayne Westerberg, the South Dakota boss who gives McCandless work?

Vince Vaughn's Westerberg gives the drifter a job in Carthage and something like a home, until the boss's own arrest cuts the stay short and sends McCandless back on the road.

Brian Dierker, who plays Rainey with no acting experience, joined the production to do what job?

Guide the rafting scenes was the plan, until Penn cast the river guide himself as Rainey, a major supporting role as Jan Burres's partner.

Leonard Knight plays himself in Penn's Into the Wild, showing McCandless round which folk-art landmark near the Salton Sea?

Salvation Mountain was Knight's second try: the first collapsed after a rainstorm in 1989, so he began again in adobe and donated paint and kept working on it for almost thirty years.

Alongside a supporting-actor nomination, Into the Wild's second Oscar nomination was for what?

Film Editing was the other nomination, for Jay Cassidy, but he lost to The Bourne Ultimatum, and with its acting nominee beaten too the film left the 80th Academy Awards empty-handed.

Which song on Vedder's Into the Wild soundtrack is a cover of a 1989 single by the Canadian act Indio?

Hard Sun was the one hit of Gordon Peterson, who made a single album as Indio and then walked away from the business; he later sued over Vedder's altered lyrics, and the suits were dropped.

Which Into the Wild soundtrack song does Vedder perform with its guest guitarist and singer, Jerry Hannan?

Society was not Vedder's own: Hannan wrote it, one of only two songs on the album from another writer, and joined him in the studio to play guitar and sing the backing vocals.

As Penn's film ends, what does Carine McCandless carry home to Virginia in her backpack?

Her brother's ashes go home in Carine's backpack as the film closes; moments earlier the dying Chris imagines running back to his family, a reunion that never happens.

Vedder had earlier written songs with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for which 1995 film starring Penn?

Dead Man Walking got two Vedder songs, and he later covered the Beatles for Penn's I Am Sam, so by 2007 Penn simply handpicked him to write the music for the McCandless story.

Penn shot the bus scenes in which tiny Alaska town, 50 miles south of the real site?

Cantwell stood in because the real clearing was too remote for a crew's technical needs, and the town had earlier been a partial location for a 1920s silent, Lure of the Yukon.

Which magazine ran Krakauer's January 1993 article on McCandless that grew into Into the Wild?

Outside ran the 9,000-word piece, and Krakauer then retraced McCandless's two years on the road, from college graduation to Alaska, to expand it into the 1996 book.

Which parting gift did McCandless accept from the electrician who dropped him at the Stampede Trail?

Rubber boots were about all the help he would take: the driver, alarmed by his light pack, offered to buy him proper equipment, and McCandless turned it down, leaving with the boots and a packed lunch.

Krakauer interrupts McCandless's story to recount his own 1977 solo climb on which Alaskan peak?

Devils Thumb took him three weeks alone on the Stikine Icecap just after college, and he retells the climb to show how closely McCandless's motives matched his own as a young man.

Which young artist who vanished in the Utah desert in 1934 does Krakauer set beside McCandless?

Everett Ruess, aged 20, set off with his pack donkeys and was never seen again; searchers found the animals and the word 'NEMO' cut into the sandstone of Davis Gulch, but no sign of the man himself.

Which novelist did Krakauer single out as McCandless's favorite writer?

Jack London's northern adventure stories fed his dream of Alaska, and Krakauer pairs him with Thoreau as the reading behind McCandless's stripped-down, ascetic way of living.

Ron Lamothe's 2007 documentary about McCandless shares its title with which 1903 Klondike novel?

The Call of the Wild was, Carine McCandless has said, part of what fed her brother's wish to disappear; Lamothe's road-trip film reaches conclusions about the death that contradict both Krakauer and Penn.

Carine McCandless's 2014 memoir alleging an abusive upbringing is titled what?

The Wild Truth alleges the parents inflicted verbal and physical abuse, fuelled by Walt's drinking, which Carine names as a reason her brother wanted to vanish; Back to the Wild is the family's 2011 photo book.

What did McCandless learn about his father on a 1986 trip to California?

He had two families at once: long after Chris was born, Walt was secretly keeping up his relationship with his first wife, and even fathered another child with her.

Walt McCandless moved the family to Virginia in 1976 to work as an antenna specialist for whom?

NASA hired Walt as the family settled in Annandale; Billie worked as a secretary for Hughes Aircraft, and the couple went on to run their own consulting business from the house.

McCandless graduated from Emory in May 1990 with a double major in history and which other subject?

Anthropology and history were his double major, finished with high grades; soon afterwards he loaded up his Datsun, drove west and stopped contacting his family altogether.

Which Portland, Oregon campus's front lawn doubled as Emory for Penn's graduation scenes?

Reed College's lawn stood in for Atlanta in late 2006, though some shots were taken at Emory's real graduation ceremony that May; Reed was the first college to refuse to join the U.S. News rankings.

By the count in his own journal, for how many days did McCandless survive at the Stampede Trail bus?

113 days passed between his arrival in late April 1992 and his death in mid-August; a failed attempt to walk out in July, when a river in flood barred the way, left him stuck there for the final weeks.

McCandless slipped into Mexico by paddling through the spillway of which Colorado River dam?

Morelos Dam, built in 1950 under a US–Mexico water treaty, sits a mile below where the California line meets the river, and he had paddled there without a permit while rangers looked for him.

Which Imperial Valley camp on a torn-down Marine base did McCandless reach in December 1991?

Slab City took its name from the concrete slabs left behind when the wartime Camp Dunlap was torn down, and campers living off the grid simply parked their trailers on them.

Which 1997 Krakauer book, born of a deadly 1996 Everest season, followed the McCandless story?

Into Thin Air grew, like its predecessor, out of a magazine assignment, this time Krakauer's own account of the storm that trapped climbers high on the mountain.

In Carthage, South Dakota, McCandless worked for Wayne Westerberg at what kind of facility?

A grain elevator pay packet did not sit well with him: in a later postcard he told Westerberg the money had made tramping too easy and that his days 'were more exciting when I was penniless'.

After abandoning his car, what did Chris McCandless do with the last of the cash in his wallet?

Burned it. He treated the stalled car as a chance to shed everything else too, leaving most of his belongings behind and moving on by foot.

In Bullhead City, Arizona, McCandless used his real name and Social Security number to work where?

McDonald's employed him for about two months while he hid the fact that he was sleeping in an empty mobile home. He quit soon after a manager asked him to wash more.

Under Ron Franz's guidance, Chris McCandless worked the story of his travels into what leather item?

A belt came out of those lessons. Franz, a widower who had lost his family in a car accident during his Army service, spent his days alone in a leather workshop.

What did the electrician who drove McCandless to the Stampede Trail press on him along with lunch?

Rubber boots, two sandwiches and a bag of corn chips were all he would take. He turned down an offer to detour to Anchorage for proper gear.

What did Krakauer find half a mile downstream of where a flooded river turned McCandless back?

A basket on a cable hung at a river gauging station, and it sat on the bus side of the water that summer. Had he known, he could have ridden it across to safety.

What did the men who found Chris McCandless's body see taped to the door of the bus?

An S.O.S. message said he was injured, weak and in need of help. He signed it with his real name, yet troopers still had no idea where the young man came from.

After a hitchhiking ticket reached their Annandale home, McCandless's parents hired whom to find him?

A private investigator named Peter Kalitka followed many leads. His one real find was that the young man had given away his entire savings.

Chris McCandless let his parents believe he would follow his Emory degree with what?

Law school was the plan his parents believed in, and he had talked about it excitedly at Emory. Instead he gave every dollar of his savings away and stopped writing home.

Eddie Vedder, who wrote the songs for Sean Penn's Into the Wild, is the lead singer of which band?

Pearl Jam's frontman was handpicked by Penn, and after seeing a rough cut he handed over a first batch of songs in just three days.

As captain of his cross-country team in Virginia, Chris McCandless urged teammates to treat running as what?

A spiritual exercise is how he framed it: his runners were to picture themselves racing against all the evil and hatred in the world.

Chris McCandless, usually an A student, got an F in which subject for ignoring the lab-report format?

Physics was the one class he failed, because he thought the teacher's lab-report rules were pointless. His family saw the same streak in sports, where he resisted being coached.

Chris McCandless co-founded which club during his years at Emory University?

College Republicans, of all things: he called himself an ardent fan of Ronald Reagan even as his studies turned toward poverty, racism and world hunger.

For his last two years at Emory, Chris McCandless refused on principle to give or accept what?

Gifts were off the table, which is why his mother was so touched when he handed her a present and a sentimental card on Mother's Day, the day after he graduated.

As a teenager, Chris McCandless spent weekends in Washington, D.C., doing what?

Feeding homeless people and urging them to turn their lives around filled his weekends. He once secretly put a homeless man up in the trailer parked beside his parents' house.

In July 1992, with her son missing for two years, Billie McCandless woke one night certain of what?

Chris was calling her for help, she was sure of it, in the very month he found himself trapped at the bus. She left a note for him on the door every time she went out.

Which relative, shown a photograph by police, first confirmed the body in the bus was Chris McCandless?

A half-brother, Sam, was the one relative police could reach in Virginia, because Walt and Billie had moved away. He then drove to Maryland to tell them in person.

Chris McCandless took which American writer's essay as gospel, feeling morally bound to flout the state's laws?

Henry David Thoreau was a guiding voice: McCandless marked a passage on chastity in his copy of Walden, one reason he is believed to have stayed celibate.

The Stampede Trail that McCandless followed skirts the northern edge of which Alaskan national park?

Denali's northern boundary runs close to the Stampede Trail, which leaves the highway near Healy. Past its first eight miles the old road is a rough track fit only for hikers and all-terrain vehicles.

On learning from two hitchhikers that Chris McCandless had died, the elderly Ron Franz did what?

Renounced his faith: the old man gave up on God and bought his first bottle of whiskey in a long time. He had taken his young friend's advice to live on the road and was awaiting his return.

Chris McCandless bought a used canoe in Arizona planning to paddle the Colorado River to where?

The Gulf of California was his goal, but in Mexico the river frayed into a maze of canals that never reached the sea. English-speaking duck-hunting guides ended up driving him and his canoe to the coast.

In the drifter slang Krakauer records in Into the Wild, what sets a 'leather tramp' apart?

Having no vehicle is the mark of a leather tramp, who must go on foot or hitchhike as McCandless did. Jan Burres, who roamed the West on her own wheels, belonged to the other tribe.

Before driving north at 23 for his own solo Alaskan climb, Jon Krakauer quit what job in Colorado?

Carpenter was his trade, and once the climb was over he went straight back to the same construction work. Into the Wild uses the episode to show how alike he and McCandless were at that age.

Jon Krakauer writes in Into the Wild that his fiercely competitive father expected him to become what?

A physician, ideally trained at Harvard Medical School, was the career Lewis Krakauer began grooming him for before kindergarten. The rift that opened helped his son understand McCandless's anger at Walt.

Stormbound on his solo Alaskan climb, Jon Krakauer accidentally set fire to what borrowed from his father?

A tent, lent to him reluctantly, was scorched when a match he tossed aside lit a bag of trash. The damage left the air inside about thirty degrees colder.

Gene Rosellini, an Alaskan eccentric Krakauer sets beside McCandless, spent a decade trying to live how?

Without modern tools: he allowed himself only what he could make by hand, to test whether a person could still live as in the Stone Age. After more than a decade he concluded that it could not be done.

Carl McCunn, a photographer Krakauer compares with McCandless, died in Alaska after failing to confirm what?

His flight out was never firmly arranged: he believed a pilot friend would return for him in August but had never confirmed the plan. He was left with dwindling supplies as the cold set in.

Critics liken McCandless to which British naval officer whose last Arctic expedition vanished with both ships?

Sir John Franklin had already led one overland trek on which eleven men died, yet he was promoted and sent north again. Krakauer argues the comparison is unfair to McCandless.

Krakauer's first theory held that McCandless had mistaken which poisonous plant for an edible look-alike?

Wild sweet pea was his first suspect. He later dropped the idea, concluding McCandless had identified his plants correctly, though Penn's film still shows the mix-up.

Gaylord Stuckey, who drove McCandless the last leg to Fairbanks in an RV, first met him where?

In a hot spring: they got talking in the thermal pools at Liard River, a stop on the Alaska Highway where McCandless had been stuck for days. Stuckey's job forbade picking up hitchhikers.

Which Russian novel did Chris McCandless read and annotate during his last weeks alone at the bus?

Doctor Zhivago filled up with his margin notes, some hinting that he was ready to rejoin human company and stop avoiding closeness. It was the last book he read.

With no notebook in his pack, where did Chris McCandless keep his terse Alaskan journal?

In the back of a book: he used the blank end pages of his handbook of the region's edible plants. Troopers recovered it along with his body.

Besides his journal, what recovered from the bus showed troopers how Chris McCandless spent his final months?

Five rolls of film came out of the bus with his camera. Once they were developed, the electrician who had driven him to the trail recognised the face in the self-portraits at once.

Which weapon did Chris McCandless take down the Stampede Trail to feed himself in the bush?

A .22 rifle is a small-game gun, and small game is mostly what he lived on: squirrels, porcupines and birds. The man who drove him to the trail thought it far too light for the country.

Ten months after their son died, what did Walt and Billie McCandless fix inside the bus?

A memorial plaque went up inside, and Billie also left a first-aid kit with a note urging whoever found it to phone their parents. The river was still too high to ford, so the couple flew in.

Which moment in Chris McCandless's story does Krakauer choose to open the first chapter of Into the Wild?

The drive to the trail, with a stranger who picked him up just beyond Fairbanks, comes first, and the body is found in chapter two. Krakauer gives the ending away early because his real subject is why it happened.

Before heading into the bush, McCandless tried to hand the man who had driven him his loose change and what else?

His watch was offered along with his last coins. The driver, more worried than grateful, urged the young man to take a packed lunch from him instead.

Krakauer's 1993 magazine article about Chris McCandless set what record at the publication?

Most reader mail: no article in the magazine's history had drawn more letters, many of them from Alaskans who thought McCandless reckless. Krakauer gives part of a chapter to those critics.

Which Oscar winner for Kiss of the Spider Woman plays Walt McCandless in Sean Penn's Into the Wild?

William Hurt plays the exacting father whose son cuts off all contact. The film's cast shared a Screen Actors Guild nomination for best ensemble.

Which Oscar winner for Pollock plays the anxious mother Billie McCandless in Sean Penn's Into the Wild?

Marcia Gay Harden plays Billie, left for two years with no word from her son. It was one of several films she made in 2007, another being the Stephen King adaptation The Mist.

What did Chris McCandless decline to bring that would have shown him a nearby river crossing?

A topographic map would have marked the gauging station just downstream. He had no good one with him because he wanted the country to feel uncharted.

Following advice he had picked up in South Dakota, how did Chris McCandless try to preserve his biggest kill?

Smoking it was the wrong call for Alaska, where the locals air-dry their game. The flesh spoiled and he had to leave nearly all of it to the wolves.

At a desert flea market, Chris McCandless helped Jan Burres run a table selling what?

Secondhand books suited him perfectly: he sorted the stock and talked up his favourite authors to the browsers. When he moved on, he would accept no money from Jan.

Unable to find work in San Diego, how did Chris McCandless travel north to Seattle?

Hopping freight trains carried him up the coast, but Seattle had no job for him either. He drifted back to California and had Ron Franz collect him.

Some Alaskans accused Chris McCandless of doing what to three stocked cabins a few miles from the bus?

Vandalising them was the charge, but the National Park Service never treated him as a viable suspect. Krakauer concludes he did not even know the cabins and their emergency stores were there.

One summer Chris McCandless wrote a computer program for his parents' firm, then refused to do what?

Explain how it worked: he kept the secret even from his father, whose business it was written for. The two were equally stubborn, and Chris resented every attempt to control him.

The miner Earl Pilgrim used the Stampede Trail, later followed by McCandless, to reach his claims of which metal?

Antimony ore went out on sleds towed by Caterpillar bulldozers over the frozen winter trail. The abandoned road upgrade of the 1960s was meant to let trucks haul it all year.

Which paralysing disease did a 2013 theory, later tested by Krakauer, blame for Chris McCandless's final collapse?

Lathyrism, a paralysis of the legs, was proposed by Ronald Hamilton, a retired bookbinder who saw a parallel with prisoners poisoned in a wartime camp. It would have left McCandless unable to forage or hike out.

Jon Krakauer first told the story of his solo Alaskan climb in which 1990 essay collection, before Into the Wild?

Eiger Dreams gathers a dozen of his mountaineering pieces, most of them written for magazines in the 1980s. The Alaskan climb is its closing chapter, and he retold it to shed light on McCandless.

At the party thrown for his 1986 graduation, Chris McCandless surprised his father with which expensive present?

A telescope, and a costly one, came with a moving speech of thanks to his father. Soon afterwards he set off across the country on the first of his long road trips.

Chris McCandless spent the summer after his sophomore year at Emory delivering pizzas for which chain?

Domino's had a diligent driver who kept careful track of every dollar he earned. At home that summer his relations with his parents soured, for reasons they could not work out.