How Chris McCandless Died: An Update

It's interesting how little traction this aspect of the McCandless story gets.

I’m no expert on mushrooms but I have a friend who is a botanist so I sent him that picture. He sent it to another friend who is an expert. Gary Laursen, Phd. Director, High Latitude Mycological Research Institute, LLC. Wrote that…

On day 89 of Chris’s journal he reports food that he has gathered and presumably eaten. “Woodpecker, frog, many mushrooms.” On day 90 he writes the largest entry in the entire journal- the word “DREAM”. He draws a circle around it and adds arrows pointing back up to the words “many mushrooms”.

http://www.christophermccandless.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=8819

There was an acute cause of death. One in wich we may only speculate. In the broader sense, he died from being unprepared. On a little thread drift note, I hear Alaska is only a half hour drive from Anchorage ;-)

I think the cause of death is pretty clear, he starved to death. His body weighed 83 lbs. McCandless himself said he was starving. He was running a big calorie deficit for about three and a half months. Running a calorie deficit like that inevitably leads to death if something doesn’t change dramatically.

Terra Incognita Films has a really interesting article on McCandless and Krakauer’s depiction of him. That is the source of the above photo. The article draws three conclusions:

I. Chris McCandless did not die as the result of eating a poisonous plant or “moldy seeds.”

III. Counter to the portrayal in the Krakauer book and Penn film, Chris McCandless carried “into the wild” a wallet with multiple sources of identification and $300 in cash, as well as a map.

The author and film maker isn’t a “hater,” he’s a fan of McCandless’ spirit:

It is the idealized McCandless, the seeker, who in the end matters most to me.

I don’t think it’s an either/or choice between admiring the adventurous spirit of McCandless or acknowledging that mistakes resulted in his death. Both are simply realities.

The mushroom take is certainly interesting. I'm surprised that hasn't been explored (maybe it has). In that case, it does seem that Krakauer could be reading too much into McCandless' journal and have blinders to everything else. That would be a bit foolish since the journal is pretty brief.

What happened to that hypothesis?

I think the rabbit starvation hypothesis is accepted by almost all survival experts, as well as the coroner.

Not only was he not getting all the food he wanted, but what food he was getting was mostly things like squirrels and birds. Starvation was nearly inevitable with what he killed, UNLESS he had preserved the moose. The bear and wolf he “missed” might well have been wounded by the .22 rifle he was shooting.

[Note: I edited this. Below is only part of his journal. The day’s in brackets I gleaned from the following article] According to this article the whole journal contains approximately 430 words, 130 numbers, nine asterisks and a handful of symbols. That same page also quotes Krakauer with some info not reflected in the diary: “In the last three weeks of July, (McCandless) killed 35 squirrels, four spruce grouse (a bird of which the journal makes no mention, but which is identifiable in some of the photos), five jays and woodpeckers, and two frogs, of which he supplements with wild potatoes, wild rhubarb, various species of berries, and large numbers of mushrooms.”

Here are some photos of parts of the actual journal.

Here are some excerpts from his journal

Day 2: Fall through the ice day.
Day 4: Magic bus day.
Day 9: Weakness.
Day 10: Snowed in.
Day 13: Porcupine day….
Day 14: Misery.
Day 31: Move bus. Grey bird. Ash bird. Squirrel. Gourmet duck!
Day 43: MOOSE!
[Day 44: butchering extremely difficult; fly & mosquito hordes; remove intestines, liver, kidneys, one lung, steaks; get hindquarter & leg to stream]
Day 48: Maggots already. Smoking appears ineffective. Don’t know, looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life.
Day 68: Beaver Dam. Disaster.
Day 69: Rained in, river looks impossible. Lonely, Scared.
Day 74: Terminal man. Faster.
Day 78: Missed wolf. Ate potato seeds and many berries coming.
[Day 89: Many Mushrooms. DREAM]
[Day 92: Dr. Zhivago]
Day 94: Woodpecker. Fog. Extremely weak. Fault of potato seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great jeopardy.
Day 100: Death looms as serious threat, too weak to walk out, have literally become trapped in wild—no game.
Day 101-103: (No written entries, just the days listed.)
Day 104: Missed bear!
Day 105: Five squirrel. Caribou.
Day 107: Beautiful berries.
Day 108-113: (Days were marked only with slashes.)

Most fatal cases of mushroom toxicity have nasty GI symptoms beginning from 6-24 hours after ingestion. With no help at all in the wild, he would likely have been quickly incapacitated and dead within a week if that were the cause.

"James- Don't you think that's painting Krakauer with a broad brush?"

I don't think so. Perhaps I should have worded it differently. However Kraukaur wrote and published more than one book without adequate research (IMHO) The Into the Wild and Into Thin Air being two examples that I am aware of. He also only presents one side of a given story, makes for a good read, but journalism it is not. That would not be so bad, however he presents himself as a journalist. That he is not.

"Into Thin Air"

What was wrong with this?

–B.G.–

For starters, google Anatoli Boukreev and The Climb.

To me, Into Thin Air always had a self-serving reek to it, but when you look at the story angle he was promoting — the ugly side of the commercialization of big-time alpinism — well it certainly achieved that goal, although in the end it probably inspired a lot more of the ugly commercialization it decried. Witness the tragedies last year, and many others in the intervening years…

An interview with somebody whose opinion I truly respect, that of Reinhold Messner.

Edit redundant phrase

So he says that how Krakauer describes Boukreev in the book is exactly as he is…where's the inaccuracy?

Sounds more like people are mixing up opinions with facts.

The reason the starvation theory doesn't do the trick for me is how he went from ok or a decent state to incredibly weak, unable to move. From the brief research I've done on starvation, it appears that it has a continual effect/symptoms over time. That's what perplexes me. The sudden crash doesn't make sense.

Edit to add: Him being 83 pounds at the end doesn't necessarily mean starvation either. So he becomes extremely weak on day 94 and dies just under 3 weeks later. I would guess he lost most of the weight during that time frame. As to why? Well he certainly was having trouble finding food but personally, I'm unsure as to what was the cause of his death.

I think there's every reason to believe it was a long steady decline, that he slowly starved to death until it killed him. A person with the diet he was subsisting on would definitely be starving. He said he was starving almost three weeks before he died.

It takes a while to go from 140+ to 83. He was talking about weakness on day 9. It looks like he was trying to escape by day 69. That's about 44 days before he died. If you're already starving, down to 100 lbs or so, 44 days is a long, long time.

Day 68: Beaver Dam. Disaster.
Day 69: Rained in, river looks impossible. Lonely, Scared.

To quote Wikipedia: His body was found in his sleeping bag inside the bus by Butch Killian, a local hunter, on September 6, 1992.[12] McCandless had been dead for more than two weeks and weighed an estimated 30 kilograms (66 lb). His official cause of death was starvation. (66 lbs was extrapolated to 83 because his body was there for at least two weeks.)

Even Krakauer says he’d run up a huge caloric deficit and was teetering on the brink by July 31. If you're teetering on the brink from starvation, and you starve for three more weeks at an even faster rate (because you're too weak to hunt and gather properly) death is inevitable.

"Him being 83 pounds at the end doesn't necessarily mean starvation either. So he becomes extremely weak on day 94 and dies just under 3 weeks later. I would guess he lost most of the weight during that time frame."

The BMI of 14 (~86 pounds) starvation threshold can be found many places on the net.

The graph above, posted by Buck, shows a pretty uniform negative slope starting at 142 pounds, and ending at 84 pounds.

[Not "piling on", just slow to post.]

In the end, I'd imagine the root cause, even if not the direct cause, of his death was starvation. The starvation weakened him so significantly, that other 'things' (that's a scientific term) would have an increased negative effect on him.

Fair enough. Thanks for the information. I had missed the graph earlier.

Before this thread, I had linked the cause of his death with my admiration of his spirit. I thought that they were inseparable and by stating that he starved canceled out everything else. But that is obviously not the case. While I still admire him for what he did and stood for, I understand that he likely did die of starvation.

Krakauer is misleading. It amazes me that his cause of death is still being argued, he starved! Read this and watch his documentary: http://www.tifilms.com/wild/call_debunked.htm

The paper came out last month.

http://www.wemjournal.org/article/S1080-6032(14)00277-4/fulltext