Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Into the Wild trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Into the Wild is the rare true story that people argue about decades later. In 1990 a new graduate gave away his savings, cut off his family and spent two years drifting across the American West under an invented name, before heading into the Alaskan bush with a small pack and a paperback or two. Jon Krakauer turned the story into a book that sat on the bestseller lists for two years, and Sean Penn spent a decade chasing the rights to film it. These 50 questions cover all of it: the road years and the strangers who fed, housed and tried to stop Chris McCandless; the bus on the Stampede Trail and what became of it; the shifting theories about how he died; the book's structure and the other wanderers Krakauer sets beside him; and the 2007 film, its cast and the Eddie Vedder soundtrack. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something you did not know. Play it if you have read the book for school or seen the film more than once, or print it for a book-club night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01McCandless gave the $24,000 left in his savings after Emory to which charity?
Oxfam
Oxfam got the lot, more than $24,000 (about $59,000 in 2025 dollars), and McCandless then drifted, working as a farm-hand and restaurant food preparer only when he had to.
Q 02Which alias, its surname lifted from a Welsh tramp-poet's 1908 memoir, did McCandless go by?
Alexander Supertramp
Alexander Supertramp borrows from W. H. Davies, the Welsh poet whose 1908 book The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp recounted his years drifting across America, and the rock band took its name from the same book.
Q 03A flash flood disabled McCandless's Datsun, and he abandoned the car beside which desert reservoir?
Lake Mead
Lake Mead National Recreation Area is where the Datsun gave out at the end of his first summer on the road, and from there he carried on by hitchhiking, soon completely out of cash.
Q 04In Penn's film, McCandless leaves Carthage after his boss Wayne Westerberg is arrested for what?
Satellite piracy
Satellite piracy puts Westerberg behind bars in the film; the real Westerberg owned a grain elevator in Carthage, South Dakota, and McCandless went back to work for him after Mexico.
Q 05Shooting which animal did McCandless call 'one of the greatest tragedies of my life' in his journal?
A moose
A moose, stalked and shot illegally on June 9, 1992, became the journey's great regret, and the journal entry reads 'I now wish I had never shot the moose.'
Q 06Where did bus 142, McCandless's Stampede Trail refuge, find a permanent home in September 2020?
The University of Alaska museum
The University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks announced on September 24, 2020 that it would restore the bus and show it outdoors; the bus parked at a Healy restaurant is the film's replica.
Q 07How much weight did Emile Hirsch shed to play McCandless's final, starving weeks in Into the Wild?
40 pounds
40 pounds came off Hirsch for the role, which earned him a Screen Actors Guild nomination for best actor, and Roger Ebert called the performance 'hypnotic'.
Q 08Which Eddie Vedder song from Into the Wild won the 2008 Golden Globe for Best Original Song?
Guaranteed
'Guaranteed' also drew a Grammy nomination for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, and Vedder's score work brought the film its second Golden Globe nomination.
Q 09McCandless's last self-portrait shows him waving and holding a note that opens with which words?
I have had a happy life
I have had a happy life and thank the Lord, the note begins, and it ends 'Goodbye and may God bless all!'; the photograph was taken near the time of his death.
Q 10Which future Twilight star plays Tracy Tatro, the teenage singer McCandless gently turns down?
Kristen Stewart
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.
Q 11McCandless walked onto the Stampede Trail with a ten-pound bag of which staple?
Rice
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.
Q 12Which electrician, the last to see McCandless alive, drove him from Fairbanks to the trailhead?
Jim Gallien
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.
Q 13Why did Alaska's agencies call the Stampede Trail bus a safety hazard and remove it in June 2020?
Q 21Which actress plays Jan Burres, half of the hippie couple who twice take in McCandless?
Catherine Keener
Catherine Keener's Jan and her partner Rainey meet McCandless in Northern California and again in the desert in December 1991, and Keener had played opposite Penn himself in 2005's The Interpreter.
Q 22Which veteran of the one-man show Mark Twain Tonight! earned an Oscar nomination as Ron Franz?
Hal Holbrook
Hal Holbrook got Oscar and Screen Actors Guild nominations for the retired widower who teaches McCandless leatherwork, and he also narrates the DVD of the family's Back to the Wild.
Q 23What does Ron Franz, the widowed leather worker, offer as McCandless sets off for Alaska?
Hikers kept dying or needing rescue
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.
Q 14Which Army helicopter carried the Stampede Trail bus out to Healy in June 2020?
CH-47 Chinook
A CH-47 Chinook flew the 1946 bus to Healy, where it went onto a flatbed truck bound for an undisclosed location until a Fairbanks home was announced that September.
Q 15By what nickname is Fairbanks City Transit bus 142, abandoned by road workers in 1961, best known?
The Magic Bus
The Magic Bus was a 1946 model left on the Stampede Trail in 1961, and after the book it drew so many pilgrims that Walt McCandless fixed a memorial plaque to his son inside.
Q 16Who discovered McCandless's body inside the Stampede Trail bus on September 6, 1992?
A hunter seeking shelter
A hunter seeking shelter for the night came upon the bus, state troopers later confirmed the remains inside a sleeping bag, and the cause of death was officially ruled to be starvation.
Q 17What did McCandless's July 30 journal entry, beginning 'Extremely Weak', blame for his decline?
Wild potato seeds
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.
Q 18Krakauer's 2015 co-authored study found which toxin in the Hedysarum alpinum McCandless ate?
L-canavanine
L-canavanine, an antimetabolite toxic to mammals, led the report to call it 'highly likely' that the plant contributed to his death, after earlier blame had fallen on sweet-pea alkaloids and mould.
Q 19Krakauer's book first floats 'rabbit starvation', protein poisoning from over-relying on what?
Lean meat
Lean meat with no fat can starve a body even while it eats, and Krakauer paired the idea with a second suspect, a toxic plant, for a death the state recorded simply as starvation.
Q 20Which river, swollen by snowmelt each summer, does Krakauer's book call McCandless's 'Rubicon'?
Teklanika
The Teklanika, whose Athabascan name means 'water-amulet river', is the crossing on the way to the bus that has since proved deadly for those retracing his route.
Adopt him as his grandchild
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.
Q 24Which actress, Hirsch's co-star in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, plays Carine McCandless?
Jena Malone
Jena Malone plays Chris's younger sister, born in July 1971, and the real Carine later published her own account of growing up in the McCandless house.
Q 25Which comedy star, in a rare dramatic turn, plays the harvest boss Wayne Westerberg?
Vince Vaughn
Vince Vaughn stepped from comedy into drama for the part, playing the South Dakota contractor McCandless came back to work for before heading north to Alaska.
Q 26Brian Dierker, who plays Rainey with no acting experience, joined the production to do what job?
Guide the rafting
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.
Q 27Which artist plays himself, showing McCandless the painted adobe hill he built near the Salton Sea?
Leonard Knight
Leonard Knight built Salvation Mountain from adobe, old tyres, car parts and thousands of gallons of paint covered in Bible verses, and the film simply cast him as himself.
Q 28Alongside a supporting-actor nomination, Into the Wild's second Oscar nomination was for what?
Film Editing
Film Editing was the other nomination, and the American Film Institute meanwhile named it one of its ten Movies of the Year for 2007.
Q 29Vedder's lead single 'Hard Sun' covers a 1989 track by which Canadian act that made just one album?
Indio
Indio was Gordon Peterson, whose sole album Big Harvest had a top-ten hit with the song, and in 2009 he sued Vedder over altered lyrics; the case was dismissed.
Q 30Which singer-songwriter wrote 'Society' and performs it with Vedder on the Into the Wild soundtrack?
Jerry Hannan
Jerry Hannan is the only name beside Vedder's in the film's soundtrack credit, which lists the songs as performed by the pair.