Into the Wild

TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH. NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA. THOU SHALT NOT RETURN, ’CAUSE “THE WEST IS THE BEST.” AND NOW AFTER TWO RAMBLING YEARS COMES THE FINAL AND GREATEST ADVENTURE. THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN

Dr. Jonathan Southard, Dr. Ying Long, Dr. Andrew Kolbert, Dr. Shri Thanedar, and I coauthored a paper titled “Presence of L-canavanine in Hedysarum alpinum seeds and its potential role in the death of Chris McCandless,” which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine in October 2014.

I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is the best….I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your t

He wasn’t truly starving in the most technical sense of that condition….[But] it wasn’t arrogance that had killed him, it was ignorance…, which must be forgiven, for the facts underlying his death were to remain unrecognized to all, scientists and lay people alike, literally for decades.

Unlike McCandless, however, I have in my backpack a 1:63,360-scale topographic map (that is, a map on which one inch represents one mile).

No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Supertramp, master of his own destiny.

John Muir is remembered primarily as a no-nonsense conservationist and the founding president of the Sierra Club, but he was also a bold adventurer, a fearless scrambler of peaks, glaciers, and waterfalls whose best-known essay includes a riveting account of nearly falling to his death, in 1872, while ascending California’s Mt. Ritter.

Sunlight glinted off the water as we chugged up the Strait of Georgia. Slopes rose precipitously from the water’s edge, bearded in a gloom of hemlock and cedar and devil’s club. Gulls wheeled overhead. Off Malcolm Island the boat split a pod of seven orcas. Their dorsal fins, some as tall as a man, cut the glassy surface within spitting distance of