Life of Christopher Johnson Mccandless

Christopher’s full name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He was born on 12 February, 1968. He grew up in Annandale, Virginia, located in affluent Fairfax County. His father Walt McCandless worked as an antenna specialist for NASA . His mother, Wilhelmina "Billie" Johnson, was his father's secretary and later helped Walt establish and run a successful consulting company in Annandale. From early childhood he was unusually strong-willed which came to the notice of his teachers. As he grew older he acquired physical endurance and an intense idealism. He was captain of the cross-country team in high school. In 1986 he graduated from W.T. Woodson High School. In 1990 he graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. At that time Christopher surprised his family by donating his remaining college funds at his disposal - around $24,000 - to a charity committed to fighting starvation, and disappearing with no further contact with his family. He then began traveling under the name ‘Alexander Supertramp’.

Christopher made his way through South Dakota, California and Arizona where he worked at a grain elevator. He rowed a canoe down remote stretches of the Colorado River to the Gulf of California. He used a minimum of gear and funds. He had a long cherished dream of an ‘Alaskan Odyssey’ where he would live far away from civilization. He maintained a journal, which logged his spiritual and physical progress as he faced the forces of nature. He hitchhiked to Fairbanks, Alaska in April 1992. One of McCandless's most interesting quotes comes from a letter he had written to a friend he had made while hitchhiking: ‘So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun’.

He hiked along the snow-covered Stampede Trail. Christopher found an abandoned bus used as a hunting shelter parked on an overgrown section of the trail near Denali National Park and started his attempt to live off the land. He had some camping equipment, a 10-pound bag of rice, a book of local plant life and a Remington semi-automatic rifle. He assumed he could search for plant food and capture prey. His journal contains entries of a total of 189 days. These entries range from joyous to grim with McCandless' fluctuating fortunes.

In July, after living in the bus for several months, Christopher decided to leave, but found the trail back blocked by the Teklanika River, which was then much higher and swifter than when he crossed in April. On August 12, 1992, Christopher wrote what are assumed to be his final words in his journal: ‘Beautiful Blueberries’. McCandless tore the final page from Louis L'Amour's memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, which contains an excerpt from a Robinson Jeffers poem entitled ‘Wise Men in Their Bad Hours’: ‘Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made Something more equal to centuries than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness. The mountains are dead stone, the people admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness, the mountains are not softened or troubled and a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper’ On the other side of the page, He added, 'I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!' Christopher's body was found in his sleeping bag inside the bus. He had died of starvation on 18 August 1992.

Christopher was the subject of the book, 'Into the Wild,' by Jon Krakauer. Sean Penn wrote a screenplay from that book and directed the film of the same name, in 2007.