Into the Wild summary

It was August 1990 when Jan Burres and her partner, Bob – two middle-aged drifters in an old van – pulled to the side of the road near the Oregon-California border. Looking into the trees, Jan saw what she describes as a pitiful-looking kid gathering wild berries in a gallon milk jug with the top cut off. “Said his name was Alex,” Jan recalls. “He was big time hungry. But real happy.”

Estranged from her own son, who was about McCandless’s age, Jan took an immediate liking to him. He joined the couple at their beach camp for about a week. When he moved on, heading north, Jan thought that was the last they’d hear from him. But McCandless stayed in touch, sending them a postcard every month.

One Thursday in January 1991, 80-year-old Ronald Franz came across McCandless hitching a ride back out to his desert camp from Salton City, California. Ron drove McCandless into the badlands, dropping him off past a hippie camp by some natural hot springs. Heading back into town, though, Ron couldn’t stop thinking about the kid who called himself Alex. 

“I thought he was too nice a kid to be living by that hot springs with those nudists and drunks and dope smokers,” Ron recalled. He headed back out a few days later to try and convince McCandless to go straight.

In September 1990, Wayne Westerberg pulled over for a gangly hitchhiker who said his name was Alex McCandless. The young man had an easy charm – and he left an impression on Wayne. 

A few weeks later, McCandless showed up at Wayne’s place in Carthage, South Dakota, and Wayne gave him a job at the grain elevator he owned.

When he started up the Stampede Trail, in the northern shadow of Denali, McCandless was giddy with excitement. At last he would fulfill his fantasy of being alone in the wild. He practically bounded into the backcountry, said Jim Gallien, who had given McCandless a lift to the trailhead – and was the last person to see him alive. Gallien, a native Alaskan, was disturbed by how little gear McCandless had for a long-term stay in the backcountry, and insisted the boy take his waterproof boots and two sandwiches. 

McCandless saw gear as an encumbrance, a barrier between him and the wild. And truth be told, he didn’t really need it. For four months, he lived happily, subsisting on foraged plants and small game. Ultimately, it wasn’t a lack of gear that killed him, but two errors.

Over the years, dozens of people have walked off into the wilds of the Last Frontier, never to return. The rugged beauty of the Alaskan landscape may inspire romantic fantasies of communing with nature – but, in reality, it’s a hardscrabble existence that even the toughest Alaskans sometimes don’t survive. Hundreds of people, even Alaskan natives, have starved to death in the backcountry over the years. 

McCandless had been living pretty well in the backcountry for months. That, in itself, shows he was resourceful, hardy, and tougher than most.

Having spent years getting to know McCandless through his letters, photographs, and the lasting impressions he left on the people he met on the road, author Jon Krakauer has reached some conclusions on McCandless’s untimely death. 

First, he believes that McCandless was not a foolhardy kid with a death wish, as many Alaskans derisively describe him. He wasn’t suicidal; he had grit and tenacity, and he came very close to surviving his foray into the wild.