In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and
walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his decomposed
body was found by a party of moose hunters.
Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the ed¬itor of Outside magazine
to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy’s death. His name turned out to be
Christopher John¬son McCandless. He’d grown up, I learned, in an affluent suburb of
Washington, D.C., where he’d