Jon Krakauer thinks the subject of his new biography was a lot like the adventurous souls who risked their lives going into the southern Utah wilderness back when it was truly remote.
Krakauer's book, "Into the Wild," is a portrait of Chris McCandless, a 23-year-old who hiked into an unpopulated Alaska forest in April 1992 armed only with a .22 rifle. Intending to live off the land, he carried 10 pounds of rice plus two sandwiches and a bag of corn chips that a trucker had given him.Other than that, McCandless had a rucksack filled with paperbacks, a camera with five rolls of film, and a mind brimming with concern about social issues and a love of the wilderness.
In September 1992, moose hunters found his body near the rugged Stampede Trail, inside an abandoned Fairbanks city bus that had been used decades before as housing for workers. He left behind journal entries scribbled on the pages of his paperbacks, a goodbye note and five rolls of exposed film.
McCandless had starved to death.
Working from these scraps of information, Krakauer was able to retrace McCandless' trips through the West before his Alaskan odyssey. Via interviews with family and acquaintances and visits to places McCandless wandered, the author managed to recreate the life of a brilliant and driven young man.
"McCandless had been good at everything he'd ever done," Krakauer said in a Deseret News interview during a visit to Salt Lake City. Recently, Krakauer also covered the North Star Wilderness Expedition trial in Panguitch for Outside magazine.
Chris McCandless was "extremely confident, perhaps overconfident. He was so good at things that, for him, for a challenge to be worthwhile it had to be pretty severe.
"For him, a challenge at which you know you're going to succeed, it's no challenge at all."
For a challenge that did not put something important on the line, McCandless would have asked, what's the point? "He wanted it to be a real test . . . it had to matter."
McCandless thought that to test himself against the rigors of nature, the stakes had to be real. In Alaska, they were real, all right: his life.
He could have saved himself if he had taken a good map, but he didn't want to know exactly where he was.
"He was looking for a blank spot on the map. And in this day and age where there are no more blank spots, he created one by leaving the map behind."
As a climber, Krakauer knows about testing the limits. During a solo climb of the Devil's Thumb in Alaska, made when he was about McCandless' age, Krakauer nearly lost his life meeting the challenge. Climbers take risks; it's in their blood.
"To make a climb more challenging, you try a harder climb or you limit the gear you take, maybe you leave the rope behind, and you might leave your partner behind," he said.
"Into the Wild" compares McCandless with another adventurer who never returned from the wilderness, Everett Ruess. A skillful artist and a lover of natural beauty, Ruess disappeared in the southern Utah canyons in 1934, age 20.
"I think there's a lot of similarities" between McCandless and those who risked their lives in the red-rock country, Krakauer said.
"Utah is, I think the most spectacular wilderness in the lower 48, certainly. In some ways it's more spectacular than much of Alaska. . . . Southern Utah's one of my favorite places in the world.
"In the '30s, when Ruess was knockin' around these parts, it was as wild then as Alaska is now, if not more so."
Ruess was the same kind of person as McCandless, he believes. Not that McCandless was suicidal or foolish, not that he was terribly unprepared, but he tested his mettle against the elements and he lost.
In fact, McCandless spent time in southern Utah after he graduated from college, just prior to his Alaskan trip.
When Krakauer interviewed legendary Moab river-runner Ken Sleight for the book, Sleight said he thought McCandless was the same sort of person as himself and his friend Ed Abbey.
"We like people fine, but then we get sick of 'em and have to go off by ourselves for a while, then we come back," Krakauer said, quoting Sleight.
The appeal of the wild country was the same for McCandless. He was raised on Jack London books, so Alaska seemed the ultimate wilderness to him.
"And in this day and age, Alaska in this country is certainly the only wilderness left," Krakauer said.
"There's plenty of wilderness in Canada, but it's shrinking fast, even up there."
So what? What's the value of wilderness? "Wilderness has played an essential part in our national character. We've always had a frontier, in which we could transform ourselves, to achieve some sort of state of grace."
Wilderness is where an adventurer can test his/her mettle. The survivors presumably are stronger and more at peace with themselves.
McCandless came surprisingly close to becoming one of the winners.
His biggest mistake was in not knowing how to preserve a moose he shot. "He'd asked hunters in South Dakota how they preserved moose meat, and they said, `Well, you smoke it.' But they have smokers, they have a lot of gear."
McCandless tried to smoke moose meat by digging a cave and lighting fires, but the meat spoiled.
"Up in Alaska, everybody knows you don't smoke it. You cut it in thin strips and air-dry it," Kra-kauer said.
"If he'd known that, that moose would have sustained him for many months. He wouldn't have had to eat the plant that killed him."
That was McCandless' other big disaster. He had relied on a handbook describing plants that the Alaska natives eat, and one of those was the wild potato. Although that handbook advises that only the roots of the wild potato are edible, it does not say the seeds are toxic.
In fact, testing isn't conclusive, but Krakauer believes the seeds are toxic when eaten in quantity. McCandless photographed a huge collection of the seeds that he had gathered.
The hungry man ate both wild potato roots and the seeds, which contain alkaloids, probably of a type related to locoweed. The toxin can inhibit digestion, and if someone eats too much of it he can starve no matter what other food he eats.
"EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT. SEED," McCandless wrote on July 14.
Too weak to walk out, he could only write a goodbye note and take a photo of himself with it, using his camera's timer.
"I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOOD-BYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!" the note says.
Too weak to hike out, he knew he had lost his life in facing the challenge of the wild. He faced death bravely and awaited the end.
That McCandless lost doesn't diminish the importance of facing challenges in nature. Certain people need to meet the wilderness head-on.
"And you know, what worries me is, when the wilderness is finally gone - and it will be, before too long - what's going to happen to this sort of essential component of our national mythology and our national character?" Krakauer asked.
"What's going to replace our wilderness?"