http://nmge.gmu.edu/textandcommunity/2006/Peter_Christian_Re...

"Some like McCandless, show up in Alaska, unprepared, unskilled and unwilling to take the time to learn the skills they need to be successful. These quickly get in trouble and either die by bears, by drowning, by freezing or they are rescued by park rangers or other rescue personnel–but often, not before risking their lives and/or spending a lot of government money on helicopters and overtime. When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament using one of several routes that could have been successful."

McCandless didn't ask for a book to be written about him. Why should anyone care one way or another that an individual they didn't know decided to do something for his own sake with little effect on anyone else.

If I, or anyone, decide tomorrow they'd like to take a very long walk in the woods and not return for six months, why does society at large need to weigh in on that? It's not a question of moral or ethics. People are consistently smug, morally prescriptive, and hindsight-ridden whenever the topic of McCandless comes up.

You cannot wander off into the wilderness with no preparation expecting to cause no undue burden and danger to society for the exact same reason that you cannot jump off a building or shoot yourself in the middle of the street and expect it to be no one else's business.

You are willfully endangering wilderness personnel and spending enormous sums of public money when you get in trouble or die in the wilderness because you were unprepared.

There's no waiver you can sign and send to the forest service that says "Hey, I have no idea what I'm doing but I like it that way and don't bother rescuing me or recovering my body because I'm trying to be one with nature or something"

Yours is a very dangerous attitude to have in the outdoors. It is not the 1700s anymore. It is literally always someone's job to do their absolute best (e.g. the government's best) to rescue you or to recover your body if you get in trouble no matter where you are on Earth, no matter how dangerous.

It's incredibly irresponsible to think that you have no effect on the world around you in an age of GPS and helicopters.

Teenager goes on a "growing up quest" in the hopes of becoming some type of Ranger or "Space Colony Guide". He and a group of others wormhole out to some planet and have to survive for a time before being wormholed back.

On the front end, you have to show up with equipment you think you'll need. Since you don't know anything about what environment you'll be warped in to, you have to do your absolute "Boy Scout Best". Main character shows up with a parka, a knife, this-and-that.

"Don't worry kid, you don't need that parka. Today you're not going to some arctic desert so you don't need it. Keep the knife though. I had to turn away some poor shit for bringing a space suit; regulations clearly stated a habitable environment. All set? Step on through."

On the other hand, there are always people who are going to pursue extreme ventures. But given how few people are willing to enter into life or death scenarios like I described, I don't find the the argument that these people have any noticeable effect on the economies of the state very convincing.

Rather, the most important key difference here is in the individual's preparation for these activities.

Yes people wingsuit, but try going to any skydiving drop zone without having quite literally hundreds of jumps with dozens as formal training in a wing suit. They will first laugh at your stupidity then get extremely serious and curse you out of the building for being a dangerous fool.

People who free solo mountains are not amateurs. They have thousands of hours of training and have climbed the exact same route safely so many times they know each hold my heart.

McCandless was a reckless fool. Not only had he never been to where he went with someone who knew their way around before he went alone, but he had no training doing similar things in any other proper context and that staggering lack of knowledge cost him his life.

If someone has never skydived, and they saunter up to a 2000ft cliff wearing a wingsuit and jump off thinking they are taking the same risk as the extensively trained professionals they've watched on youtube then that makes them a reckless fool as well.

Ultimately, the individual pays the greatest price. There is a difference where you if you want to set the land-speed record on a public highway in rush hour versus going out alone into the wilderness or climbing a mountain without a rope. The difference is where you draw the line. I believe that if any individual desires to stake out into the wilderness, alone, live in nature, hunt, and forage without a whisper to society at large - that is precisely the place where you would go. If not in wilderness, then where?

There is a big difference between these two cases. Honnold's level of preparation is hardly even comparable to McCandless lack of even basic knowledge of his surroundings.

What do you think the ranger's most likely response is going to be, assuming that they have a basic sense of morality, that they like their job and want to keep it, and that they don't enjoy cleaning up after fatal mishaps?

(Difficulty: the climber is in good shape and knows what he's doing, but he isn't Honnold. He actually is a suicidal person. Now, did your ranger make the right call?)

Property and ownership also has a unique definition for the United States, and the "wild" referred to in this conversation is owned by the government, plain and simple. With this perspective it should be clear why individuals cannot just go out and "do whatever they like" even if this is a hypothetical argument. There is no un-owned place in the United States. There are positives and negatives to this reality, but it is reality and should help to ground the conversation.

I wonder what another model that could fit the massive expanses of space set aside in the Unite States; certainly one with a less consistent hierarchy of responsibility would be worse than the current system. It is also important to realize how artificial the "wild" is in the United States given the American philosophy of individualism and property ownership, especially given the status of the population as exceptionally empowered by rights, wealth and technology. I say artificial because without the organization that protects the wild spaces, they would not exist as they do today.

It would be interesting to discuss the meaning of "the wild" or its equivalents in other cultures, as I imagine we would see an incredible variety of meaning. I, however, have mainly experienced and philosophized about the American and European wilds.

I deeply resonate with the sentiment expressed by the Alaskan ranger in the top level comment. As a guide of private and commercial expeditions I am constantly amazed at the alternate realities of understanding and respect people have about wilderness and I cherish my role, however small, as an ambassador to the wild.

I know a few Search and Rescue workers, volunteers and Rangers, they regret their job as babysitters for the incompetent but command respect by outdoorsmen. They are essential to the wild as we have it in the United States.

I used the word unique in this piece too much, but there are a number of special things about the United States and the American psyche that are central to this conversation. I do not claim these perspectives are right or correct or ideal, but it is how I see it today.

People can die trying to rescue others who are doing stupid stuff. That matters too.

They can, and they do. One recent example from near where I live:

https://www.firehouse.com/lodds/news/21137013/nc-rescue-squa...

There is some nuance here: the reality is that well-prepared people doing the best they can do become lost or injured and require rescue. This is not a "bad" thing but simply the result of activities that are not risk-free, and everything from government agency capabilities to volunteer SAR exist to mitigate this risk. But there is a difference between a person who requires rescue despite their best efforts and a person who requires rescue due to their complete negligence. There is no "bright line" between these two groups, but it's often quite clear on the ground whether or not someone had the respect for the situation that they should have. Search and rescue operations for these individuals are often shorter and lower risk, anyway, because they leave behind information (or even carry communication devices) that make them easier to find, and their preparation may make their injuries less severe or better handled by the time rescuers arrive.

My personal take is that no one is forced to be on a search/rescue team. Those guys and gals are invariably adrenaline junkies, just like the people they rescue, and they're equally passionate about adventure in the outdoors. The only real difference is that they have the professional qualifications needed to do their paid or volunteer work as safely as possible. And they need something to do, just like the rest of us.

Now, alpine/cliff rescue, yep, that's a tad more exciting.

First jumping off a building or shooting yourself in the middle of a busy street are bad analogies - by their very nature those acts are disruptive to those nearby. But going out into an uninhabited place, having no desire to be rescued if things go awry, nor making any requests to get rescued - if we have any personal freedom at all, how can we not have the freedom over our own bodies if we are not disturbing others?

We live in a society and there is no easy way to divorce ourselves from that reality.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aokigahara#Suicides

There is a lot of land that you can buy very dirt cheap and go live as you see fit on it without having to answer to anyone - minus some property taxes. There you can try to bushcraft to your hearts content.

Apprenticing under a physician is a particularly poor example, given how much medical science changes in 20 years. Not to mention it makes it easier for quacks to reproduce. Instead, aim lower: cosmetology licensing. I think we can all agree that you don’t need months of training to cut someone’s hair. This is simply a protectionist guild.

Maybe I'm just weird, but I'd rather that the person who's going to use a bunch of sharp instruments around my head to irrecoverably change my appearance for the next few months have some training on how to do that properly.

That probably goes double for the people who are going to have them using a bunch of chemicals on their hair as well (hair dyes and bleaching, permanent wave, etc).

And individuals, but yes, exactly.

> Apprenticing under a physician is a particularly poor example, given how much medical science changes in 20 years.

Perhaps, but I think buried in there is a call for greater granularity.

Imagine that you could easily train up to be a neighborhood medic for a small community. You'd be able to handle, say, 70% of common medical needs: run bloodwork, provide immediate trauma care, dispense prescriptions, etc., but can escalate via telepresence to a higher-ranked medical professional when you need to.

And, with experience, you can move up the skill ladder.

That's kind of where I was going.

> I think we can all agree that you don’t need months of training to cut someone’s hair.

Maybe? I'd want to know that whomever is cutting my hair is aware of head lice, and knows how to sterilize their equipment. Probably also some basic first aid training if they slip up and cut me. Months of training shouldn't be a requirement to get started, but there is a reasonable call for a base level of know-how.

Definitely demands more thinking. :)

I mean, really, are you gonna volunteer for a suicide hotline and tell people "you asshole, if you kill yourself, think of all the work people will have to do!"

Pay attention to what is considered important and unimportant in that statement. Humans are not important. Official positions, regulations, and budgets are. Way too often, people start to worship the process and completely forget that it's just a mean to some end.

McCandless didn't ask for any of that, and I concur that he was welcome to commit suicide his own way. But it was suicidal, and everybody knew it, so it is necessary to add the cautionary tale whenever he's brought up. It would be best, as you say, if we all just ignored him.

However, it didn't seem to me that Krakauer painted McCandless as too rosy. He seemed to integrate both the accomplishments and the stupidity that led to those accomplishments pretty well.

He seemed to show McCandless as a very capable and nice person, who in stubborn hubris abandoned and hurt his family and ended up dying. Not holding him up as a flawed hero like many fans of the book, and not sneering at him like many (rightly) do. A self-condemning tragedy, not an exultation or condemnation.

And it's clear from McCandless's own actions - especially leaving a note on the bus asking for help - that he did not really understand what he was getting into, and did ultimately desire help from others. So, ultimately, even he himself did not believe that his fate was nobody else's business.

Finally, despite your assertion that, "It's not a question of moral or ethics," your entire position is inescapably an ethical position. Because one's opinion on whether society has a responsibility to attempt to protect these people, or whether it's better to simply leave them to their fate, is, by definition, an ethical position.

I don't deny that dying out alone in the wilderness does end up having a cost to others. I don't agree that the potential cost of it should preclude someone from doing it.

The whole argument against McCandless begins to sound absurd.

"Does an individual have the right to die alone in the wilderness?"

If you pose the question this way, the answer becomes obvious. If you were to ask me if someone has the right to suicide by train or suicide by cop, or even if they have the right to jump off a bridge, I'd be inclinded to say no, or at least hesitate on the last one.

But being alone in the wilderness, prepared or not, is a different category.

It’s my life. If I want to sail around Africa and I’m held for ransom, leave me to it.

If I want to hike a deadly trail, don’t come rescue me and then blame me for it.

Because of the people who died looking for this bus, nobody else can now see it. As a traveler, I see this happening too often: I see a place, I do something, 5 years later you can’t anymore because someone hurt themselves.

My idea is: put up a sign saying “5 people died here” and let new visitors figure it out for themselves.

Most of us have lived very sheltered lives. Most of us haven't felt what it's like to be really, really thirsty. Or really, really hungry. Or really, really cold. Or really, really tired. Or really, really lonely. Or really, really scared. Or all these things at the same time.

I can definitely imagine many people would sign a "don't help me if I'm in danger" waiver out of principle or motivated by some romantic fantasy. Then they end up shitting themselves in a freezing hole in Alaska because they ate bad berries, and they're crying and regretting everything and would be willing to do anything to be out of this place. Suddenly the lofty ideals and the romantic movies start feeling really dumb and absurd.

The principles don't matter anymore, the survival instinct kicked in a long time ago. Fortunately you have a satellite phone and you manage to call the rescue. "Sorry sir or madam, but you did sign a waiver. If you want help you'll have to pay the $300,000 standard search and rescue fee in advance. Thank you for choosing the Walt Disney Search and Rescue Services. Have a pleasant evening!".

Hanakapiai Beach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanakapiai_Beach

ultimately, though, i agree with this. a sign saying "5 people died here" (maybe with w/e relevant contextual info) is the exact nature, and extent, of information that i think needs to be made clear to people.

You are in the minority, and it is absolutely someone else's business. At least it's their job to ensure that you're safe.

It doesn't even have to be for months at a time, just a simple wrong way turn in a national park on their way someplace else:

https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu...

(Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12019567)

While that's a long story (and well worth reading), it illustrates how even the simplest things going wrong could lead to an entire family dying, within walking distance of paved roads, certainly less remote than Alaska. There were multiple SAR teams/missions that put their own lives at risk, even when it wasn't their job, that took responsibility to find out what happened.

Anyone who wants to "go out into the wilderness" has to remember that, it isn't just their own life at stake.

  > but often, not before risking their
  > lives and/or spending a lot of
  > government money on helicopters
  > and overtime.

Yes, it would be better if SAR services were never needed, but they serve the public, it's not the public that serves SAR when they decide to step outside.

It'd be one thing if McCandless were willingly and flagrantly putting his life in danger with the expectation that he could dial a number and be rescued at any time - but that didn't happen did it? He played it out to the end starving to death.

He absolutely would have dialed a number to come rescue him if the technology was available, which it wasn't because it was 1992 in central Alaska.

He also did require expensive rescue anyway. You think they just left his body in that bus after it was discovered? Absolutely not, plus there are no roads there anymore, so they had to fly his body out in a very expensive helicopter ride.

I think the parent poster is right - he died because he ate poison berries:

It might be said that Christopher McCandless did indeed starve to death in the Alaskan wild, but this only because he’d been poisoned, and the poison had rendered him too weak to move about, to hunt or forage, and, toward the end, “extremely weak,” “too weak to walk out,” and, having “much trouble just to stand up.” He wasn’t truly starving in the most technical sense of that condition. He’d simply become slowly paralyzed.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-chris-mccand...

It's also quite possible the berries wouldn't have killed him if not for the fact that he was already starving. From wikipedia:

> In 2013, a new hypothesis was proposed. Ronald Hamilton, a retired bookbinder at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania,[7] suggested a link between the symptoms described by McCandless and the poisoning of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp in Vapniarca. He put forward the proposal that McCandless starved to death because he was suffering from paralysis in his legs induced by lathyrism, which prevented him from gathering food or hiking.[26] Lathyrism may be caused by ODAP poisoning from seeds of Hedysarum alpinum (commonly called wild potato). The ODAP, a toxic amino acid, had not been detected by the previous studies of the seeds because they had suspected and tested for a toxic alkaloid, rather than an amino acid, and nobody had previously suspected that Hedysarum alpinum seeds contained this toxin. The protein would be relatively harmless to someone who was well-fed and on a normal diet, but toxic to someone who was malnourished, physically stressed, and on an irregular and insufficient diet, as McCandless was.[27]

and

> The article notes that while occasional ingestion of foodstuffs containing ODAP is not hazardous for healthy individuals eating a balanced diet, "individuals suffering from malnutrition, stress, and acute hunger are especially sensitive to ODAP, and are thus highly susceptible to the incapacitating effects of lathyrism after ingesting the neurotoxin".[7]

I'm guessing the two hunters who had to find his decomposing body, and the officers who had to remove it, might feel slightly different than you do. That's ignoring his parents and sibling(s).

It's easy to say "it's my own business" but to pretend like his actions didn't affect any others is awfully self-centered of him and you.

It's far more self-centered to stupidly get yourself into a dangerous situation that others will be obligated to rescue you from. And it's even more self-centered (to the point of arrogance) to dismiss that as the result of "limited sensibilities."

Was just trying to ascertain why your sensibilities were so limitless.

Incidentally, you're wrong in your assumptions. Go to Alaska and ask people up there what they think of the guy. You'll not find more people critical of him in any other state. Virtually none of them are looking to curtail anybody's liberties, not least because more often than not they enjoy these same liberties. I think a lot of people in this thread have confused criticism with calls for regulation. To be frank I think this confusion betrays an authoritarian mindset.

> "As a park ranger both at Denali National Park, very near where McCandless died, and now at Gates of the Arctic National Park, even more remote and wild than Denali, I am exposed continually to what I will call the “McCandless Phenomenon.” People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically no nexistent. I know the personality type because I was one of those young men."

You responded to this man's informed perspective with a rant about smug people not minding their own business. You and a few other commenters then somehow judo-threw the conversation into a matter of when government regulations / curtailments of liberties are or aren't warranted.

This argument has been made many times in my lifetime.

Hundreds of kids die in pools because millions of kids swim.

If there was an abandoned mine next to every pool, yeah... people would do something about that.

I have no problem with people doing risky activities (I do plenty myself), but you should be aware of the consequences, not only to you, but to your family, to SAR, etc and act accordingly.

His point is that mine-shafts are closed, but pools are not and there are a lot more people drowning in pools than killed in accidents in mine-shafts. This is a classic case of double standards.

More people die in pools because there are more pools and more people in them.

The percentage chance of dying in a pool is incredibly low, partly because it’s low risk and partly because we mitigate the actual risk (training, lifeguards, etc).

Mine shafts are an order of magnitude more dangerous. If pools were as dangerous as mine shafts, they wouldn’t be anywhere near as common.

A. McCandless was negligent, his neglect was bordering mal-intent. He should be made an example of, not for his search of freedom, but for behaving stupidly as to put the lives of search and rescue workers in danger, or at the very least putting them to work and depleting funds from the state that could have gone elsewhere. He had an ill-effect on his family and friends, and should have put them foremost before venturing out with little preparation.

B. McCandless engaged in an act of personal liberation. Even if he ultimately died, he at least had the courage to embrace his own version of freedom.

I don't think the people in camp (A) are wrong, but ultimately it's not how I want to live my life - where I have to value the peripheral concerns of society above my most intrinsic desires.

The quote in the GP explicitly mentions why it is someone else's, namely the taxpayer's, literal business:

> spending a lot of government money on helicopters and overtime

If you choose to go off into the wilderness ill-equipped, that is indeed your choice. But if you do so, I trust you then have no expectation of being rescued should you come into trouble, and I trust you made this clear to any friends or family ahead of time.

Meanwhile taxpayers somehow don't always make it their literal business to get every citizen out of harm's way when they're kidnapped abroad. Something that member of society actually should always be rescued from.

Of course, he made no pact. He went out alone, died alone and his body was found incidentally by a group of hunters.

_Everyone_ has a pact with rangers that they should be rescued immediately. That's literally what rangers do.

The exact same thing works with a doctor or an EMT. You make it sound like if someone started choking in a restaurant you would expect the EMT to say "well he never made a pact with me to rescue him from choking to death" so the guy dies.

At the same time people have the right to be left alone IF THEY WANT when they get lost, choke to death etc., but there is no way to differentiate, so the default is to try to save these people with the associated costs. Think about Do Not Resuscitate choice.

There is no simple solution here.

> Of course, he made no pact.

That's incorrect. McCandless made that pact by being part of this society. The pact is implicit: it's the act of breaking it that requires effort (if it's even allowed at all).

It is deeply subjective, and as such any notion of correctness is moot.

> It is deeply subjective, and as such any notion of correctness is moot.

Eh, not so much. Maybe that would be the case if we were talking about some idealistic "how it should be," but the GP's scenario wasn't that. Practically, in modern American society, park rangers are going to assume an obligation to rescue you without you having to make an explicit pact with them. To claim that it's otherwise is false.

Isn't the whole idea of a social contract (which is what you describe, right?) of any kind debatable and really unprovable?

Couldn't one say it simply is a responsibility they have collectively taken onto themselves, on their own?

Of course, it doesn't change what will happen, what rescuers will do. Probably won't even change how they'll do it, or how they'll express their motivations from doing so.

So... how do you prove or disprove the existence of said pact?

> McCandless was explicitly escaping society. He had already vacated his family, friends, home, money, his vehicle. At this point he's a major outlier in terms of being a member of society.

So what? How McCandless felt or what his intentions were at any particular time doesn't actually change the situation vis a vis society and its rescue personnel.

The moral/philosophy question is this; Person expresses to you the intent to do something that will likely result in their own death and possibly the death of others, what is your responsibility to that person and the others they may intentionally or unintentionally cause to die?

As a diagnostic tool, the question illuminates a lot of constructs in the morality, empathy, and objectivity of a person.

You can play around with it in a number of ways, is there “intent”? Is there malice? Forethought?

The debate over seatbelts, helmet laws, and other traffic laws often falls into this debate.

Would it be different if you could say that insurance companies don’t have to pay the medical bills of people who become injured after not wearing a belt? Can you take vehicular homicide off the table if a DUI driver kills someone by hitting their car and they aren’t wearing seat belts? Especially if its provable that if they were wearing belts they would not have died?

Because the consequences of the choices the person makes impacts others, does the group have the authority to limit those choices to protect itself from harm?

I think my freshman philosophy class spent like 4 weeks on just this topic.

I agree, but there are a remarkably large number of people that do this (or go sailing in the ocean, or who go spelunking etc.) without preparation and then end up calling for a rescue. Some people do it several times. THAT is the main issue.

As someone who used to be a firefighter, the issue is that walking into the woods with little to no prep, means that there is an extremely high likelihood that you'll need to be rescued. This of course puts a lot of other lives in danger (during the rescue or recovery operation) because you decided to not be prepared.

Is something automatically good because a lot of countries do it?

"The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans" (2012)

https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu...

Wilderness areas are a "part of society." But wilderness is an idea as much as it is a place, and the only place you can engage in the idea of "wilderness" is in geographical wilderness.

Your statement suggests that the rules of domestic life should apply in wilderness, but it's our domestic laws that say that there should be some territory where the spirit of domestic life doesn't prevail.

He told me they gave him a brochure (maybe at the dmv?), describing how montana was different - distances were vast, services were sparse and basically that you needed to take it seriously.

I would imagine that goes 10x for alaska.

Oh yeah, and I've listened to enough episodes of Joe Rogan to realize bears... well, they are never accurately portrayed in the media.

One specific episode I can place is this one:

Joe Rogan Experience #1105 - Michael Hunter

Although I do recall another one where he got pretty graphic, saying that bears will... I won't mention it here.

> These quickly get in trouble and either die by bears, by drowning, by freezing or they are rescued by park rangers or other rescue personnel–but often, not before risking their lives and/or spending a lot of government money on helicopters and overtime

Since 1992, only two people have died trying to reach the bus, they both drowned in the Tek (which was hard for me to cross, at 6 foot 2 and 185 lbs). One in 2010, and one last year.

As for the number of rescues:

"The state carried out 15 bus-related search and rescue operations between 2009 and 2017, authorities say" [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53106441

For what it's worth, I lived in the Yukon for 4 years. I've been bison hunting at -45C, I've spent months hunting, hiking and fishing all over the Yukon and a ton of time in Alaska too. I know what it takes.

The most common thing I hear, by far, from members of the public at search and rescue fundraisers is, "why do you go to all that trouble for stupid people?" It's a question almost always delivered with the self-satisfied smugness of someone who has no idea that they're already suffering the atrophying effects of not venturing outside of familiar territory often enough.

McCandless surely made mistakes and errors in judgement. He certainly underestimated what he was getting in to. In that, he has something in common with hundreds of thousands of casual hikers, mountain bikers, kayakers, and visitors to national parks every year. There are vanishingly few entries in the annual Accidents of North American Mountaineering where the people involved are unimpeachable in terms of their preparedness or skill. In almost every case, there's something that someone could point to that the victim did wrong, and if not, then there's always the fallback that they were dumb to be doing it to begin with.

If he hadn't died, nobody would know his name. Statistics caught up to him. Statistics will catch a few other people every year while far more visitors to the same area will escape without consequence.

The dynamics of this subject on HN in particular are really sort of obvious, given that McCandless has come up at least half-a-dozen times on HN over the years, a site not known for its enthusiasm for the outdoors. The treatment here is often about as embarrassing as someone might imagine the topic of machine learning to be on a forum for mushroom pickers.

When people get into trouble, there is usually a something that could been done either in preparation or by exercising better judgement. McCandless didn't just miss a couple of esoteric preparation steps, he failed to take extremely basic precautions like bringing a map or sanity checking your plans with someone who has experience in the area.

As explained in the essay that quote is from, Alaskans get frustrated by the glorification of McCandless because he didn't show basic respect for the wilderness he claimed to love.

> The dynamics of this subject on HN in particular are really sort of obvious, given that McCandless has come up at least half-a-dozen times on HN over the years, a site not known for its enthusiasm for the outdoors. The treatment here is often about as embarrassing as someone might imagine the topic of machine learning to be on a forum for mushroom pickers.

Give the comments in this thread a read rather than projecting your own misconceptions and you will find there are a number of people with personal experience with wilderness and the Alaskan wilderness is specific.

In fact, with many accidents, it's often a matter of compounding mistakes. (The victim didn't have a lot of experience, went out in worsening weather, lost the trail, and didn't have the gear to survive overnight.)

On the other hand, it's easy to identify "mistakes" in retrospect. Someone got caught in an avalanche so they "clearly" shouldn't have been somewhere that they could get caught in an avalanche--even if the danger was just moderate and the danger in that particular area is often moderate.

Which also speaks to your statistics comment of course. There are various levels of danger to many activities and you can reasonably reduce your chances of something going wrong but not eliminate them.

And, also of course, many people who don't participate in many of those activities see them as unreasonably dangerous. And, depending upon their political views, may think rescuing mountain climbers or even winter hikers as a waste of societal resources.

Yep! One of my favorite elements to many backcountry accidents is what mountaineers call "summit fever". It's a prevalent bug in human psychology. It gets people into trouble in the wilderness all the time, and it has a close cousin in tech circles, the "sunk cost fallacy".

We were equipped for a quick afternoon hike, nothing more -- some of us I think just had t-shirts and shorts -- and some of us started to get nervous. Others really wanted to keep going to the top, especially since we knew we were close (though not how close).

We did end up turning around and heading down after just a few hundred feet of walking in the snow. I wonder about our decision from time to time -- were we smart or overly cautious? Would it have been fine or a disaster? I guess there's no easy answer -- you can't know what would have happened.

I would say, based on the information you had at the time. You made the smart play. Don't second guess based on possibly being closer than you realized, you were far enough that you couldn't see the end, that means (and most people don't realize this) that without any other information, you had even odds that you were at no more than the half way point (in terms of either time or distance). Maybe you can look back, and can say, "oh, I knew x at the time, I just forgot to take that into account, and it would have been enough to change the risk/reward equation. But any other analysis is dangerous to dwell on.

There are countless histories in the Alps and the Pyrenees of weekend hikers that go up in t-shirts and shorts, and then suddenly the weather change... One of the members of the team fall with hypothermia and an heli need to be dispatched. Taking out resources for other rescues and putting the life of the rescuers at risk.

There are discussions in some European countries if the rescued people shall pay in case of fragrant unpreparedness, because it has begun to be quite common.

They removed the bus so it couldn't act like a moron magnet anymore. They didn't remove the location, they didn't fence it off, they didn't ban hiking. They didn't even impose an IQ test or a basic competency quiz for hiking. Anyone who wants to go out there and re-enact the McCandless Experience is still free to do so, and they're even still free to call SAR when their horrible lack-of-a-plan begins to cause them the predictable amount of personal discomfort.

You get the benefits of your risky fun but a large part of the costs are externalized.

I don't want to live in a risk-less, fun-less society either but there are limits. As long as society is footing the bill, society has an interest in imposing limits.

I'm perfectly happy letting you do whatever you want, as long as you are not endangering the public, and you bear the costs. I'd be all for a system where you can opt out of health and safety restrictions, with the caveat that it also opts you out of health and safety programs, like publicly-funded search and rescue.

This is the standard answer everyone gives, and it makes no logical sense. I worked search and rescue, and have plenty of friends that have it as their full-time occupation.

Search and rescue personal are trained professionals, who willingly signed up for that career, and who love being in the back-country. They know full and well what they're getting into, and going out and rescuing people is the definition of their chosen career. If there was nobody to rescue, they wouldn't be able to support themselves doing what they love.

In fact when there are no rescues for a while they go out in their helicopters and practice all the "dangerous" stuff putting their "lives in danger". So even if there was nobody to rescue, they'd still be out there.

Following on from your logic, it only makes sense we should ban open fireplaces and cigarettes in houses because that's the leading cause of house fires, which then put fireman's lives in danger.

> and costing the public hundreds of thousands of dollars

Please don't exaggerate, it detracts from the discussion.

The average heli rescue costs around $10k (heli's are smack on $1k/hr), and in many jurisdictions if the person getting rescued was doing something stupid, they foot the bill, not the public.

That's an amusing example to me, because indoor and outdoor fireplaces of any kind are in fact banned in my city, since it's densely built with lots of wood buildings, and because of air quality concerns, my city has deemed they are not worth the risk.

> which then put fireman's lives in danger.

And yes, the firemen will be the first to give you an earful if you don't respect the fire safety code.

> following from your logic [...], we should ban [...] cigarettes

Nice strawman though. I said it was in society's interest to set limits, I made no argument as to what exactly the limits should be. That's not my decision or yours, as long as it's public resources that are at stake, it should be a democratic process.

> The average heli rescue costs around $10k (heli's are smack on $1k/hr), and in many jurisdictions if the person getting rescued was doing something stupid, they foot the bill, not the public.

In that case, as I said, if they are footing the bill, I really have no problem with it.

The S&R folks are really adamant that they do not want to charge end-users for rescues, because that means that people will wait longer before calling them, resulting in more deaths and even higher overall costs because the rescues become more complicated.

Many who spend their lives in the mountains say that with proper training they'd rather do the risky activity (where there are many known ways in which risk can be mitigated) than die in some random / tragic car accident (where you can do everything right but still die).

BTW, fellow Canadian (Calgary) here, "hey" from the other side of the Rockies :-)

“Are liable to the public to reimburse” rather than “foot”; the distinction is critical because the rescued individual may not have the resources to actually pay or may be impossible to collect from. The more expensive the rescue is, naturally, the more likely this is to be the case.

This is overall a really good system and the volunteers love doing it and are happy to do it. It struggles a little bit in areas with communities that can't afford to donate much to a SAR team.

I would agree that after your second or third rescue though, you're becoming a nuisance and should bear some of the cost.

No. Overtime, helicopter flight hours aren't a sunk cost.

> Society should bear the cost of reasonable exploration efforts by citizens, even by those who are unknowingly underprepared.

The issue here is in that one important word: reasonable. Exploring your neighborhood? Certainly. Exploring a mine shaft without a rope? Maybe a bit less so?

> The best way to learn is to do.

Or ask people that know stuff. Or read a book, or a pamphlet. There's plenty of options other than "whatever, the other will take care of me, I don't want to think and prepare, preparation is boring".

These are all valid forms of education, but all suboptimal to going through the motions. You should strive to be prepared, but also assume you don't know everything you need to know and de-risk accordingly.

There's always some risk in everything, it cannot be avoided, but we really don't need people to learn by doing it from zero understanding of that risk, we have plenty of things they can learn from the comfort of their bed. If they then still want to go do the real thing, they'll be much less likely to require rescuing, because they will not just walk into the woods without a map going "I'll just use Google Maps if I get lost".

Or we could just tax it accordingly so it gets pretty expensive to do, but the risk is priced in. Want to remove the helmet and swimming vest or go winter hiking naked? Sure, just pay here and off you go.

I also don't see how the cost is sunk, it's proportional to the number of rescues they have to carry out, plus you risk the rescuers lives.

Liberty can't be unconditional when your actions affect others. I see no philosophical objection to saying "you're free to do X, but you're the one paying the cost if it backfires."

There are collective costs to people getting hurt and needing to be saved, and it's not a black/white thing: we enforce safety belts, we remove dangerous rocks and trees looming on roads and so on all the time.

The bus was evaluated as an hazard that encourages unprepared people to do something and get hurt, it may be a bad call, but it's not just a restriction of "people should be free to choose".

Also, the fact you pay for road maintenance does not indicate what maintenance is.

People could be on the "I like looming rocks, they give character to this road, instead use my money to lay new asphalt instead of wasting it on landscape" camp.

But the state thinks it knows better than you that exploding looming rocks is more important than letting you drive faster.

Probably not, but neither should we be leaving bait out for them either.

They didn't infringe on anyone's rights here. The mountains and whitewater and sky and bacon are all still there. They moved a bus.

No one is saying it's impossible to do what Chris attempted, but lots of people do say that he might not have died if he planned ahead a bit.

It's the general issue of people who have the idea to live in or travel through the wilderness (worthy, IMO), but attempt it without a reasonable attempt at preparation.

It's worth calling out.

These people endanger their own lives -- I think unintentionally in most cases.

And they endanger the rescue workers whose job it is to help people in trouble, whatever the reason.

Hopefully calling this out will catch the attention of at least some of the right people, and there will be a few less of them and their rescuers injured or worse.

Now I live on the coast and the most cut off I feel is when I go offshore fishing (particularly in a smallish center console). Even though you have a few friends with you, once you get 30+ miles offshore all you see in any direction is water. Going offshore fishing is more about preparation than almost anything else.

It's opinionated, but not far out there. He (McCandless) died due to a combination of poor preparation and compounded mistakes; it was almost certainly avoidable. There is an interesting question of how much responsibility individuals should take for this sort of thing.

He wasn't just speaking of the bus, he meant the whole state of Alaska

He said that a lot of people came to the area trying to relive McCandless' journey. Locals called them "pukers" because they would go into the woods and within a few days of attempting to forage for food, would inevitably eat or drink something contaminated or one of the various mildly poisonous plants in the area, begin vomiting, and give up and return to town (hopefully).

I always thought of McCandless' story as a cautionary tale. I don't think it means we should compromise on our ideals, but I do think it means we need to build skills and awareness. There are causes worth dying for, but most of the time dying can and should be avoided.

But, I get the impression that in his own head, he didn't feel a choice in the matter, or rather the alternative was worse.

Therein lies the true "moral" of the film, as I personally interpreted it: McCandless was trapped in his own head, no matter how far he traveled he couldn't escape his own mentality. The tragedy is that it seems he himself realized this too late. But, who knows -- personally, I imagine him being at peace with his decision and the ultimate result.

I see how you got the impression that McCandless was trapped in his own risk-addicted thinking from the movie, but I think that impression is editorializing on the part of the filmmakers.

I'm a rock climber and it's my experience that the risk taking in rock climbing isn't a death wish. On the contrary, it's a life-wish, a desire to experience life to its fullest even if that means risking your life. You will die--risking death is not a risk. The greatest risk you take is dying without achieving your deepest desires and dreams.

This is a pretty common view in the rock climbing community, and I think that Jon Krakauer, a mountaineer the author of the In To the Wild book, probably held a view of risk similar to my own, which is why the book presents a much more sympathetic view of McCandless' risk-taking.

When I read the book I felt McCandless was a romantic. Naive perhaps, and his death was unnecessary, but he lived his life on his own terms to a degree which is relatively rare today.

I don't mean that as anything negative about McCandless. It's just that I think it's worth saying that other people aren't also lesser for making their own different choices. They are also doing their best with the difficult problems life throws at you, giving you lots of options and few clues.

For what it's worth, the "death wish" thing wasn't meant to be pejorative -- maybe I should have used a different term. I like your "life-wish" phrasing better, thank you for that perspective.

I enjoyed both and admire his path.

We did have an interesting experience- an encounter with Dick "Black Ass" Griffith (his nickname came from the frostbite that removed his back parts) who adventured all over just on the money that Alaska gives to its citizens every year.

But the nature is amazing, and now that I compare it with other places, just plain good for the soul.

You might say when offering help saddles you with risk, it accelerates compassion fatigue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion_fatigue)

I don't know that people get dumped into the Alaskan wilderness for being unable to pay medical bills.

> Or imagine someone having a heart attack and getting angry because they should have had a better diet and exercise throughout their life - it's their own stupid fault that they're dying and why should I bother helping them.

Never hang around ER nurses.

> Or a suicidal person - just get a therapist or stop thinking those stupid thoughts that make your problem worse.

Really never hang around ER nurses.

It sounds like the locals provide help. That they're angry about it doesn't mean they think somebody doesn't deserve help.

It's a great story to make a movie about, but isn't the daily life of an Alaskan a great story too? It appears that it isn't seen as a cautionary tale at all, but an instruction on how to "go back to nature".

The best part is that he took an 8mm camera and filmed a lot of his work, including building his cabin from almost entirely indigenous materials. Those films ended up as the (PBS-involved?) documentary Alone in the Wilderness[3].

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke

[2] https://www.nps.gov/lacl/learn/historyculture/proennekes-cab...

[3] https://youtu.be/iYJKd0rkKss (partial)

It's one of my favorite films of all time, and have watched it numerous times. He had the right training and planning, knowledge, skills, equipment and support (a friend visisted regularly with supplies) to achieve it successfully.

I love that the film footage was recorded by himself, some of it is just gorgeous scenery. He demonstrates the hard work necessary to build everything for survival.

I've spent a lot of time in harsh wilderness. I've climbed Andes peaks, camped in deserts in the southwestern US, slept in tents in the Appalachian mountains in February in sub-zero temperatures. At no point was I ever not dependent on civilization. I always wore manufactured protective gear, slept in manufactured shelters, ate the products of agriculture, drank water I had hauled in from the modern water treatment. I know a lot of the local edible plants, but even when I've made a salad of garlic mustard and morels, it has always been an option to go to the store if I was still hungry afterward, or go to the doctor if I got sick from what I had eaten.

As a boy, it was awesome to live in a place where carrying a khukuri (or small sword) wasn't so out of the ordinary, and I have fond memories of bushwhacking trails, coming home smelling of earth and picking the inevitable spiders out of my clothes.

You were just enjoying nature and going back to the safety of civilization at night. McCandless was trying to break his dependence on civilization entirely. There's nothing wrong with what you were doing, I do it myself. But it's not the same thing.

That's really funny.

On the one hand, I feel a satisfying connectedness when I visit a real-life place mentioned in a book: I traveled the Spanish countryside after reading "The Sun Also Rises", and got lost in the countryside and drank red wine on the hills. I also visited the killing fields in Cambodia after reading "The Killing Fields" and "Swimming to Cambodia". It was fucking terrifying that this happened in my lifetime.

On the other hand, I can see how stressful this is for locals, like both in Alaska and Spain who aren't asking for the influx. But at least in Cambodia, it is an important historical legacy and it brings revenue.

I've come to the conclusion for myself that I don't want to bother the locals just for my own satisfaction unless the target destination has been built with concern and sensitivity, and not for exploitation. Even the latter case is still subjective: are the streets of Paris' tourist-traps exploitative and annoying? What about the shops around Giza's pyramids? Both locations seemed to be unhappy about the tourism. I spoke with a shop owner in Panama and he said the locals love/hate tourists: the dollars are important, but the psychological impact of having their homes be fishbowls is not insignificant.

That said, it's a terrible industry and is only marginally more ethical than cutting down mountains and polluting rivers for coal in my opinion.

I remember reading Into The Wild in my twenties and feeling a strong connection to Alex. Even if going to the bus wasn't a wise decision, I feel it's only human to want to cultivate those types of connections. I never went to the bus, but I was definitely curious what Alex was experiencing in the final days of his life.

I agree with GP that it's a cautionary tale, but it's more than that. It's caused thousands of people to think more about the way they live their lives. Seems a bit more substantive than simply trying to get a selfie, don't you think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bchx0mS7XOY

It used to be that Everest was a crowning achievement in a mountaineer's career. To top out, you would have to climb many, many other mountains in preparation, building skills, physique, and relationships with other mountaineers.

But now people regularly reach the top of Everest as their first (and often last) summit. If you have never reached the top of a major mountain before, you're a beginner mountaineer. And if Everest is summitted by dozens of beginner mountaineers every year, it's a beginner mountain. The primary barrier to Everest now is amassing ~$40k in expendable income to pay sherpas to drag you to the summit.

It's worth noting that what the sherpas do is still extraordinary.

I think they were saying that going to a place because it has meaning for an ideal of breaking dependence on society is more substantive than going to a place so you can take a picture to get attention on the internet. It's not about the place, it's about your reasons for going there.

The Grand Canyon is a place with incredible splendor, and I am sure there are people who go there for substantive reasons too.

Admittedly, that doesn't make for a good movie.

Over the years I've spent hundreds of hours thinking about Chris, his conscious choice to live the life he wanted and the freedom that brought him. He is one of my biggest inspirations, and I like to think we would have been friends.

Every time the sound track from the movie comes on I get tingles down my spine, and I can't help but sing along. It's easily the most-listened to music of my life, and in a strange way it's the sound track to my life.

I have mixed emotions about the removal of the bus - on one hand I understand the need to stop people visiting who require rescue, while on the other I'm sad I never made a return trip. I had always planned a solo winter trip, and somehow while living only ten hours away for four years I never made the effort.

Yet another reason to always go for it, right now.

Although the bus is no longer there, I'm sure I'll make a trek to the spot anyway, and I'm sure Chris will continue to inspire me throughout my life.

"Happiness is only real when shared" - Chris McCandless

Here's my account of my hike into the bus in 2009 http://theroadchoseme.com/the-magic-bus

I don't think I've heard any of those songs since I saw the movie when it was in theaters, but you've reminded me how much they've stuck with me. Eddie Vedder's vocals are so raw and vulnerable and there couldn't have been a better choice.

I'm going to listen to the soundtrack this afternoon -- thanks for the reminder. I'm also looking forward to reading your travelogue.

While he doesn't have much in common with Chris, I was inspired at an identity level when I first read Rolf Potts' Vagabonding as a teen and other pieces of his work like https://rolfpotts.com/storming-the-beach/.

https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-05-70.pdf

Also the US Army Basic Cold Weather Manual

http://www.survivorlibrary.com/library/army-fm31-70-basic-co...

> - "Watch the animals and eat what they eat." Most of the time this statement is true, but some animals can eat plants that are poisonous to humans.

> - "Boil the plant in water and any poisons will be removed." Boiling removes many poisons, but not all.

> - "Plants with a red color are poisonous." Some plants that are red are poisonous, but not all.

> 10-4. The point is there is no one rule to aid in identifying poisonous plants. You must make an effort to learn as much about them as possible.

I absolutely love the use of language here. So minimal, so careful, so factual.

Thank you for sharing.

The stories of McCandless's journey suggest that we should consider the psychology of self-harm and suicide when we ask about his motivations. He ignored even the most basic precautions, which considering his education and age should reveal something other than mere stupidity. He seemed to want to put himself at risk of harm -- leaving food behind, refusing assistance from locals, and not even learning to preserve meat, so the animals he killed could not feed him. It seems like his being at constant risk of death by starvation and exposure was not an accident.

Most people living in western nations have no idea of how unforgiving the wilderness can be, nor do they understand the amount of effort that it can take to survive. The amount of tourists who think that national parks are just the outdoor equivalent of Disney Land is shocking.

I can vouch for that. I don't even know how to set a snare or how to prepare a rabbit if I caught one.

College will prepare you for some things, outdoor survival isn't one of them.

The old Asimov mechanic story comes to mind too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2884684

It would dramatically change the concept but a home town located musuem would have a full circle effect to it and his life.

The recreation of the bus used to film the movie is in Healy, AK. It's exactly what you describe. And it looks so similar to the real thing I have a hard time telling them apart.

I see no net positive here, and a few net negatives.

1 - History. For better or for worse, it never the less is.

2 - If people do come from all over to see it, then, that means, by definition, it's a thing people want. You're generally supposed to provide what people want, not remove it wherever you find it.

3 - If my zero-sum theory is right, or if the numbers even merely lean that way even if still a little imbalanced, then isn't knowing the where the emergencies will happen ahead of time better than having them happen in unpredictable random places throughout the whole of a place as huge as Alaska?

Seems like a dumb response to the, observation. I wouldn't even say "problem", merely observation, unless you could show that the bus actually adds some harm that wouldn't still be there just somewhere else.

This is an extremely simplistic view. People very often want things that aren't in their best interest and it end up costing all of us, see alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, not using condoms, not using a helmet while riding a motorcycle, &c.

I don't think any government in the world is here to provide whatever people want. And even if you think about it that way you would have to consider all the people actually living there who are fed up of having to rescue lost tourist, which is expensive and potentially dangerous.

Thanks Alexander Supertramp :)

Also, as the great Dr Henry Jones jr. said, “it belongs in a museum!” That thing was responsible for many deaths over the years, and would be better suited as a safe attraction to visit by all the white suburbanites sick of how fake their existence is. Maybe with a plaque stating how many rescue missions had to be sent out because of novices not knowing what they’re doing.

However, he never knew and never will know any of that happened. All he cared about is the journey, how is he possibly responsible for inspiring unprepared people to go into the woods? It's not like he's a still-living lifestyle blogger who goads people into doing this. He's not a hero but he's not deserving of all the flack he gets.

That's one way to frame it. The other way is simply to say that it took him 113 days to starve to death. Lest anyone have the wrong impressions from the book/movie, he didn't die because he ate poisonous berries that messed up his digestive system. He simply burned more calories than he consumed.

I'm not one of those who think negatively of him. He himself wrote something to the effect of not having regrets and being grateful he went on this journey when he knew he was probably going to starve to death. Who am I to criticize him for it? He lived the way he wanted to, and when it was clear it was leading to his death, he was at peace with that.

How do you know?

Actually, reading up on it now, it seems there have been more developments since I last read it a decade ago.

In any case, let's just say there are proponents of both theories. In my opinion, though, Occam's razor points to simple starvation.

The "poison berries" refer to potato seeds, no? McCandless wrote about eating them in his journal, they weren't fabricated by some writer.

> Day 78: Missed wolf. Ate potato seeds and many berries coming.

> Day 94: Woodpecker. Fog. Extremely weak. Fault of potato seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great jeopardy.