From my understanding, all the locals where this happened think this dude is a colossal dumbass.

I think his legacy is slowly changing though, and people are less impressed by his antics today than when it happened.

I remember watching the movie and then immediately thinking, “Why the fuck did I just watch that? And why the fuck did anyone make it? This is not a story that needs to be given attention.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless#Death

Turns out no one knew that some of the plants he was eating were poisonous until after he died

Every bad situation leading up to his trip into Alaska, someone bailed him out of the situation. There was no one at the bus in Alaska to bail him out.

I have a theory that his family was abusive and he learned to distrust strangers and became convinced that he needed to always stand on his own two feet because nobody would ever truly have his back. I've been through a similar phase in my life caused by neglect and abuse throughout my childhood and adolescence. Could be totally wrong ofc but it seems to fit for me

Edit: Apparently his sister confirmed this in a memoir she wrote called The Wild Truth. There's an interesting article on the NPR website about it:

She and her brother Chris grew up with a volatile, viciously abusive father who made their weak-willed yet hyper-competent mother both his victim and his accomplice.

This is a really similar situation to mine. Took many years of therapy to get to where I am, but I'll probably never really fully heal from it.

I agree with some of Chris's viewpoints. Materialism is stupid. Buying shit for the sake of acquiring shit is stupid. Not that you should never have anything sentimental, but those kinds of things are tied to people or events.

But yeah, guy kinda lost me when he decided to camp in the Alaskan bush with no survival skills, no experience dressing a carcass, no foraging skills, and very little equipment. As others pointed out, he went there to die, then changed his mind when it was too late. A rational, non-suicidal person would have spent months preparing for this outing.

Basically everyone who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and lived (only ~2% of jumpers) regretted doing it before they hit the water. Chris jumped from the bridge and changed his mind halfway down. Going to Alaska wasn't some brave choice to be free. You can do that anywhere in the Lower 48. It was a cry for help masked as a revolutionary idea.

This sounds like the most beautiful deconstruction of Ayn Rand I've ever heard.

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To be fair, an office job is a bit like crawling into a coffin. And nobody's gonna canonize you for that.

I think there were discussions of him dying from eating raw potatoes or something like that. I just remember hearing that and thinking this guy must be the type of person who thinks chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

I know I'm being rude, but I'm with anon and always felt like I was missing something when people praised this guy. He didn't seem like an enlightened soul to me. He seemed like he was going through a severe mental health crisis. And was intensely ignorant and a bit arrogant that he could go into the wild with zero understanding of it and have a life there.

Alaska isn't as "settled" as lower 48 (continental US), the wilderness is always there for mooks to wander into.

It will kill you, just one moose will ruin your day. And the moose are the least of your worries

you don't know what fear is until you've locked eyes with a bear.

In Alaska he is always used as a cautionary tale to the point where he borders on being mythic like Icarus.

Actually, now that I think about it, Alaska sizable pantheon of guys like this. Dumb people who think they love the wilderness, but do not have any real respect for it.

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