Chris McCandless- a discussion on what he should have taken into the Denali.

L

lmalterna

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Dec 12, 2002
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Guys,
I was just rereading about Chris McCandless and thinking of Mr. Galliens thoughts that it was obvious Chris was ill prepared from the looks of his pack. My thought bent to what I would want in an extended living(say 1 year) in the far reaches of Alaska but I am unfamiliar with that type of terrain.
Looking first to firearms- I am more comfortable with them than some other aspects- I look at a light .22lr- something like a Romanian Training rifle cut to 16.5" barrel and small action parts industrial chrome plated. Along with a Mauser 98/30-06,base fiberglass stock, iron sights, 22" stainless barrel, Warn mounts and Leupold fixed 4X. ALternates would be Remington Rolling Block or Thompson Carbines- small bits again chrome plated--- simplicity- few small parts to wear/fail- and corrosion resistance.
Folding saw, 19" axe, large knife(busse or fehrman), small knife- Eriksson pukko, diamond stone. Two stainless pots for cooking/boiling water, Field guide to edible plants, topo map and compass. Personal hygene/ soap/toothpaste- wool outer garments/ poly under/ goretex parka/ mending thread & needles. Vitamins, ibuprofen, antibiotics--
One big ?? I would have is what type of shelter would be practical for one man to build in this region? Any discussion to think in diff directions is appreciated.
Thanks,
Bill
 
The idea that you can walk into the Alaskan bush and live for a year is fantasy. Native people born to the bush and living in traditional communities periodically starved to death when game didn't show. Living off the land is very difficult. What did in McCandless was arrogance and what Jack London called "a lack of imagination". There are many accounts of bush destined folks who head into the Alaskan wilderness. To live for an extended period of time requires many. many pounds of provisions, traps, fishing nets and gear, guns for big game, a shotgun and a small game .22. Axes, saws, canoes, sleds, woodstoves ...the list goes on. Read "Coming into the Country" by John McPhee.
 
I agree ablolutely with you, woodsmoke. Chris McCandless, who dubbed himself "Alex Supertamp", was a young man on a mission, but was ultimatly under prepared for that mission. He was'nt stupid, far from it, he was an exceptionally inteligent kid, but his sense of wonder and wanderlust got the better of him, and he ultimately paid the ultimate price for his indicressions.
 
The gear that bush folk actually use is pretty basic. I have spent time in the interior of Alaska and the Yukon Territory. Rifle calibers most usual were 30-30, 308, 30.06, 6.5mm. 8mm and .303. The knives I saw most frequently were a Buck 110 on the belt and a butcher knife in the pack or at camp. Lots of Case and Schrade trappers and folding hunters as well. Biggest knife on the belt was a Buck 119. Almost everyone has a .44 mag on the hip. Not all agree with this as a bear gun. We were on the Malchutna River several summers ago. My son carried a Ruger Blackhawk. An old timer told him to file down the front sight on it. When Luke asked why, the old timer said, "so it won't hurt so much when the bear shoves it up your ass".
 
If you are talking about Denali as in Denali National Park, you ain't supposed to be packing any guns there.

Alaska is its own place. As one fella put it when I lived there, "There's a lot of game in Alaska, but there is a LOT of Alaska." He meant that game tends to be in certain areas, not just spread in a thick blanket across the whole state.

I'm not familiar with this McCandless, unless it was the guy many years ago found starved to death in an old bus who had tried to live wilderness. However, as Woodsmoke and bowieman pointed out, for most anybody, it takes serious gear and serious knowledge to live in the brush there. That still doesn't guarantee survival. Sometimes you can be totally prepared to the teeth, know your gear and your area to the max, but when the big register rings, you cash in. Being prepared doesn't mean being invincable. That's for storybooks.

Now if you want to read about a guy who was capable of living off the land in Alaska (coastal) with next to nothing, read "My Lost Wilderness." I can't recall who the author was. I gave my father-in-law my copy. In it there is a character the author spent some time seal hunting with (this is back in the 50s or so IIRC) that he called Sockless Joe, because Joe never wore socks.

Joe convinced the author to come back to his camp to hunt for a while. Joe assured him that the camp had everything they needed. The author was expecting a snug cabin, fully provisioned. What he found was a spot in the middle of the trees with a blackened fire ring and a tin pail hanging from a nail in a tree. As Joe put it, "When the tide is out, the table is set." Joe would turn over rocks and toss various mussles, seaweeds, and other scurrying critters in the pail and steam it all on the fire. For a warm bed, Joe burrowed into a depression under a low hanging tree, burying himself under leaf debri. In the morning he would crawl out and shake himself off before heading for the beach with his pail.

Good reading. If I ever get the author's name I'll try to post it here.
 
woodsmoke said:
The idea that you can walk into the Alaskan bush and live for a year is fantasy.
Click to expand...

What about Richard Proenneke. He lived at twin lakes for how many years? 35 off and on I believe, now ill grant you a bush pilot flew in supplies every so often, but he pretty much kept care of him self and was fully capable to survive ( which he did).


Anyway, actually Im in the middle of the book, but I would say that a larger caliber rifle and some warmer clothing would have done him well. He refushed help and gifts from a lot of his firends, but that was how he was. Better boots maybe, and some sort of staple food, like rice, or something that would be a good last resort to get back to help. He wasn't in Denali Nat Park, just really close to the border along the Stampede Trail. He was actually surrounded on three sides by the park.
 
Proenneke was an amazing man. His cabin building skills were extraordianry. What a guy! However he did not try to live off the land. He was well provisioned, folks knew where he was and as you said he had supplies flown in. His diet was wild game, (mostly fish with the occasional sheep), AND the provisions that he had access to. He also grew a garden. McCandless expected to hunt and gather, to somehow live on a bag of rice and what he could forage or happen upon. No way!
 
Woodsmoke, I had our gunsmith at the shop I worked part time in at Fairbanks tell me a version of that front sight gag. :D As he told it, a guy brought in a .44 Blackhawk and had him cut the 7 1/2 inch barrel down to 3 inches and leave the front sight off for that very reason.

That particular smith (there were two there) was a devout blackpowder guy who felt gun design went to hell with the advent of the percussion cap. Still, he kept an old .30-06 around and used it when smoke polin didn't put meat in the cache. He didn't have electric or running water and used wood for heat. He wasn't above accepting usable stuff or extra wood when someone offered.

You called it right on those basic calibers. It isn't unusual to find a .30-40 Krag still in use. The Winchester .30-30 was popular with the natives and it wasn't unusual to see those in some pretty rough cosmetic conditions. Workbench sporterized old military bolt guns saw a lot of use. Yep, real woodsrunners up there rarely used the high dollar fancy stuff. Old, reliable, workhorse rifles in calibers of the same were the common fare.

One thing I'd add to the supply list for a brush living experience would be a BIG stock of sturdy bug dope. Bears aren't the only things that will eat you up there.
 
Proenneke also stayed at someones cabin while he canoed down river with a ton of tools to build his cabin. He came very well equipped and he had a plan he also knew the area. McCandles walked in with if I remember correctly a book of edible plants, a Remington Nylon 66 .22 rifle, a bag of rice and very little else and stayed in an old bus. If McCandles would have had a simple compass and map he could have found a park service cabin that was very close to him.
 
Ahh, so it was the guy in the bus. I was living up there at the time and remember the story coming out in the Daily-News Miner. Intelligent as he may have been, he wasn't smart, at least in this case.
 
I agree with woodsmoke, "arrogance" sums it up nicely. If the kid had taken the time to research what those who had gone before had done, what works, what doesn't, he'd probably be the author of a pretty cool book by now. The skills required to live full time in the Northern bush go far beyond primitive survival skills, and touch on everything from small engine repair, metal fabrication, carpentry, sewing, basic medicine, to butchering, to touch on but a few. One has to be a very well rounded individual (or couple) to make a successful go of it.
 
I belive, doctom54, tht he was on one side of a river that was raging from snowmelt, and that he knew the way back out, but was kept there by the river. Conversly, had he done some investigating upstream, he would have come accross a cable cart susspended above the river that he could have used to cross the river. Also take into account that this guy did not die of exposure as was suspected after his body was found: he staved to death after eating some seeds he thought were edible,and which in some strange way,prevented his body from absorbing nutients. He staved to death, even though he had food available(wild game and berries, if memory serves me).He was just not thoroghly ready to go into the environment he placed himself in. It is an interesting story, as writen by Jon Krakauer(spelling?) in the book "Into The Wild".
 
I read that book at the beach one week. It was really sad. I think his earlier adventures might have given him his overconfidnece. The kid did have some really neat experiences before he went to Alaska. He was obviously under some illusion of what it would take to live there.

If he had gone up there to live on the edges of civilisation for a year or two he would have either decided against it or had a solid base of information on which to plan. He was too much of a loner to make a go of it.

Arrogance or youthfull ignorance, aside he did have some admirable qualites. He was surviving mentally, he didn't give in to panic or despair. If he hadn't poisoned himself he probably would have made it out again. He had put himself into that situation, unprepared and undereducated. As Woodsmoke pointed out he didn't have that well rounded skillset, that many couples, even families fail to bring to the table. He did maintain his long term survival mental stability and that should earn him some credit. For whatever he lacked the kid did have grit.

As for guns and gear, on my hunting trip to the Wrandell Mts we took a side trip on the ATV's one day to an old trappers cabin off in the bush. The guy had apparently stuffed all of his worldly goods in it and left, got a job somewhere and never returned. All of the stuff you would need (aside from a front door) was there and it was a ton of stuff. We were good boys and left it all as it was but it was a real education in what it takes to live there.

This was a rough-cut log cabin with big blocks of styrofoam insulation nailed to the ceiling, dozens of traps, bales of snares, lanterns, woodstove, jerrycans, etc. There was a rifle stock poking up through the debris, but it was just an old P-14 Enfield stock, no metal.

It is one discussion to determine what you have to have with you to survive a hunting trip gone bad and another to determine what it takes to live for a full year. Unfortunately Chris M's experience was a lesson in "don't do this". Mac
 
http://www.anchoragepress.com/archives/documentb965.html

A very good tome exploring the mystery of McCandless. IMHO, he could have made it quite well adding to his pack only skills and a storehouse of knowledge. If he had done so, we might be reading his book today.

Nearly every environment contains what is needed for nourishment and survival. The key is recognizing it and utilizing it.

I read that he killed a moose. That, even if it was a yearling, would be well over a hundred pounds of usable meat, plus another twenty pounds of organ meats, and some small game. Skill and knowledge in preparing and preserving game would have yielded two pounds of meat a day for two months.

That he ate some sort of poisoned berry, I can only say that he did not take the time to identify indiginous wild plant foods like he should have.

I note that the tires are still on the bus, and likely the engine still contains oil. He did not make an attempt to summon rescue by burning them. Skills and knowledge would have served him well, even without adding an ounce to his pack. Dreaming a dream is a wonderful thing, but being prepared for when life gets real is better. Sometimes life gets very real. And in nature, ignorance kills.

Codger
 
IIRC he had been eating edible portions of that plant for quite some time but decided to eat a portion (seed pods?) that contained a really wierd acting poison.

He was in poor shape at that point having been driven to expand his diet for lack of one. With his body protein already at the expiration date a poison that prevented him from metabolising protein was the last straw.

At one point he did shoot a moose, with a .22lr! It was too warm and he couldn't preserve the meat. Mac
 
I have read and re-read "Into the Wild" as I use it in a course I teach on Literature of the Northern Wilderness. The author and others question McCandless' state of mind. Did he have a death wish? If not, then he sure didn't have the grit that others who have ventured north had. We also read "The Long Walk", "Lure of the Labrador Wild", "A Death on the Barrens", Jack London, "Coming into the Country", and discuss Hugh Glass, John Hornsby and everybody else who I can research. Some survive their ordeals, some don't. But most go out with more fight than McCandless. Napolean said that courage is only the second quality of the soldier. The capacity to endure is the first. He wanted men who had known privation all their lives. Tough guys. McCandless may not have had the right stuff to be a survivor.
 
pict said:
It was too warm and he couldn't preserve the meat. Mac
Click to expand...

It was warm and he did not know how to preserve meat. Solar heat makes the drying process go faster.

He had not studied the legume plant he was eating, sweetvetch Hedysarum alpinum, and as a result, induced an alkaloid poisoning preventing him from metabolizing food. Roots of sweetvetch were used extensively by aboriginal people, eaten both raw and cooked and used as a licorice substitute. Inuit hunters eat sweetvetch roots while hunting, but evidently know to leave the seed pods alone.

I love to gather and eat a Southern U.S. plant, poke salet P. americana L., P. decandra L, but know to only eat the young shoots and leaves, never the older reddish leaves and stalks, and never the berries. And I parboil the greens I do eat to get rid of the bitter emetic effect.

Codger
 
This is my first post so be gentle. :p

I think that Chris' biggest fault was an equal measure of arrogance and ignorance, I have not read anything on him fishing or using traps. Both of which can provide tons of food and can work 24 hours a day. I think with some fishing gear and a few conibears he could have done much better. Also from what I read he killed a caribou not a moose and if he would have built a drying/smoking rack and sliced the meat thin he would not have the problem with spoilage. The wilderness is a very unforgiving mistress, treat her wrong and you pay the price with your life. Chris
 
Gear, traps and guns don't make one a trapper or a hunter. You need skill, knowledge and experience. I don't think McCandless had these. Also, how was this guy going to survive when the weather got cold? I don't recall if the book mentioned if the bus had a stove in it. Even if it did, to cut or gather enough firewood to supply heating needs would have been a full time job. Cutting firewood is one of the great calorie burners of all time. It was a quirk of the calender that he starved before he froze.
 
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