Into the wild ebook

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Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help. Toledo Lucas County Public Library. Search Search Search Browse menu. Sign in. Into the Wild. A heart-rending drama of human yearning.

Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. Immediately after graduating from college in , McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir.

In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away.

Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild. Five feet seven or eight with a wiry build, he claimed to be twenty-four years old and said he was from South Dakota.

He explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edge of Denali National Park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and "live off the land for a few months. Gallien, a union electrician, was on his way to Anchorage, miles beyond Denali on the George Parks Highway; he told Alex he'd drop him off wherever he wanted.

Alex's backpack looked as though it weighed only twenty-five or thirty pounds, which struck Gallien--an accomplished hunter and woodsman--as an improbably light load for a stay of several months in the backcountry, especially so early in the spring. The sun came up. As they rolled down from the forested ridges above the Tanana River, Alex gazed across the expanse of windswept muskeg stretching to the south. Gallien wondered whether he'd picked up one of those crackpots from the lower forty-eight who come north to live out ill-considered Jack London fantasies.

Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that cares nothing for hope or longing.

The rivers are big and fast. The mosquitoes eat you alive. Most places, there aren't a lot of animals to hunt. Livin' in the bush isn't no picnic. It was a two-hour drive from Fairbanks to the edge of Denali Park. The more they talked, the less Alex struck Gallien as a nutcase.

He was congenial and seemed well educated. He peppered Gallien with thoughtful questions about the kind of small game that live in the country, the kinds of berries he could eat--"that kind of thing. Still, Gallien was concerned. Alex admitted that the only food in his pack was a ten-pound bag of rice. His gear seemed exceedingly minimal for the harsh conditions of the interior, which in April still lay buried under the winter snowpack.

Alex's cheap leather hiking boots were neither waterproof nor well insulated. His rifle was only. He had no ax, no bug dope, no snowshoes, no compass. The only navigational aid in his possession was a tattered state road map he'd scrounged at a gas station. A hundred miles out of Fairbanks the highway begins to climb into the foothills of the Alaska Range.

Alex pulled out his crude map and pointed to a dashed red line that intersected the road near the coal-mining town of Healy. It represented a route called the Stampede Trail. Seldom traveled, it isn't even marked on most road maps of Alaska. On Alex's map, nevertheless, the broken line meandered west from the Parks Highway for forty miles or so before petering out in the middle of trackless wilderness north of Mt.

This, Alex announced to Gallien, was where he intended to go. Gallien thought the hitchhiker's scheme was foolhardy and tried repeatedly to dissuade him: "I said the hunting wasn't easy where he was going, that he could go for days without killing any game. When that didn't work, I tried to scare him with bear stories.

I told him that a twenty-two probably wouldn't do anything to a grizzly except make him mad. Alex didn't seem too worried. So I explained that trees don't grow real big in that part of the state, that a bear could knock down one of them skinny little black spruce without even trying.

Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters that shape his life. Krakauer's book,Into the Wild, became an international bestseller, translated into thirty-one languages, and Sean Penn's inspirational film by the same name further skyrocketed Chris McCandless to global fame. Featured in both the book and film, Carine has wrestled for more than twenty years with the legacy of her brother's journey to self-discovery, and now tells her own story while filling in the blanks of his.

Carine was Chris's best friend, the person with whom he had the closest bond, and who witnessed firsthand the dysfunctional and violent family dynamic that made Chris willing to embrace the harsh wilderness of Alaska. Growing up in the same troubled household, Carine speaks candidly about the deeper reality of life in the McCandless family.

In the many years since the tragedy of Chris's death, Carine has searched for some kind of redemption. In this touching and deeply personal memoir, she reveals how she has learned that real redemption can only come from speaking the truth.

Krakauer's book and a Sean Penn film skyrocketed Chris McCandless to worldwide fame, but the real story of his life and his journey has not yet been told until now. Spanning an extraordinary range of subjects and locations, these pieces take us from a horrifying avalanche on Mount Everest to a volcano poised to obliterate a big chunk of Seattle; from a wilderness teen-therapy program run by apparent sadists to an otherworldly cave in New Mexico, studied by NASA to better understand Mars; from the notebook of one Fred Beckey, who catalogued the greatest unclimbed mountaineering routes on the planet, to the last days of legendary surfer Mark Foo.

Rigorously researched and vividly written, marked by an unerring instinct for storytelling and scoop, these pieces are unified by the author's ambivalent love affair with unruly landscapes and his relentless search for truth"