2. Chapter 1 opens with Jim Gallien driving through Alaska, when he sees a hitchhiker who looks as though he is eighteen years old. The hitchhiker is actually twenty-four years old and claims to be named Alex from South Dakota. Alex is carrying a light load for someone planning to live off the land for a few months, as he says he will do in Denali National Park. As Alex elaborates on his plan, Gallien tries to make him change his mind. Gallien is certain that Alex is not prepared for life in the Alaskan outdoors. Gallien even offers to drive him back to Anchorage and buy him some decent gear, but Alex refuses. Gallien insists that Alex take his boots and his lunch for the day; Gallien gives Alex his phone number, telling him to call if he makes it out alive. The date was April 28, 1992

3. Chapter 2 opens on September 6, 1992, at a broken down bus in Denali National Park. Ken Thompson, Gordon Samel, and Ferdie Swanson visit the park to drive their ATVs. When they arrive at the bus, there is a couple from Anchorage that looks spooked. A bad smell comes from the bus. A note is taped to the bus, begging for help. Samel discovers a dead body inside the bus, wrapped in a sleeping bag. No one has room in his vehicle to remove the dead body. Another man, Butch Killian, arrives on the scene. Butch drives back toward the highway and alerts the authorities on his two-way radio. The next day, a police helicopter removes the body of Chris McCandless, five rolls of exposed film, the SOS note, and a diary with 113 entries. An autopsy reveals that McCandless starved to death; his corpse weighed only sixty- seven pounds.

4. In Chapter 3 the reader meets Wayne Westerberg, a man who knew Chris McCandless as “Alex” before his death. Alex was hitchhiking one day. The weather was bad and Alex was ill-equipped, so Westerberg suggested he stay on with him for a while. Alex spent three days with Westerberg; before parting ways, Westerberg told Alex to find him if he ever needed work. A few weeks later, Alex found Westerberg and began working for him. Westerberg says that Alex was very intelligent and a hard worker. Alex moved on when Westerberg had to serve time for involvement with “black boxes.” Alex stayed in touch with Westerberg and as he traveled on, claimed he was from South Dakota.

5. In October, 1990--more than three months after McCandless left Atlanta--his Datsun was found abandoned at Lake Mead National Recreation Area by Park Ranger, Bud Walsh. With no license plate, Walsh could not trace the car to McCandless. The rangers kept the car for driving around the park. Krakauer learns through his research that McCandless got caught in a flash flood with the car, which caused the battery to die. Instead of having to explain why his driver’s license and registration had expired, why he did not have insurance, and why he was driving on a prohibited road in the first place--McCandless chose to abandon the car. McCandless shed unnecessary baggage and burned all of his money, one hundred twenty-three dollars, as a symbolic gesture. After spending some time hiking around the lake, McCandless hitchhiked out West and found work on Crazy Ernie’s farm. When McCandless realized Ernie had no intention of paying him, he stole a bicycle and left.

6. Soon after, McCandless met Jan Burres and her boyfriend, Bob. He spent a week with Jan and Bob and kept in touch through postcards thereafter. After receiving a ticket McCandless got for hitchhiking (he’d given his Annandale address to police), his parents contacted a private investigator. The investigator learned only that Chris had given his entire savings to charity, which really worried his parents. McCandless spent time in Colorado and Mexico where he had some difficulty navigating the canals. He spent a night in jail after being caught coming back into the US with no ID. McCandless was able to spring himself from jail but had to leave his beloved handgun behind.

7. Chapter 5 begins in May of 1991. McCandless’s camera no longer works and he has stopped keeping a journal for the time being, which makes it difficult to recount his travels. Through letters Alex sent to friends, Krakauer pieces together that he spent time in California and Bullhead City, Arizona. He spent two months in Bullhead City, got a job at McDonald’s, opened a bank account, and even introduced himself by his real name, Chris McCandless. His fellow employees remember him as a quirky but nice guy, who hated wearing socks, worked at a slow pace, and did not shower frequently enough. One woman believes the reason Chris quit is because she told him he needed to bathe. In Arizona, Chris met a man named Charlie, who showed him a trailer he could live in for a while.

8. McCandless soon left Arizona and went to live again with Jan and Bob at Niland, referred to by the locals as “the Slabs.” Jan says that even though Alex liked to keep to himself, he had a really good time when he was around people. He told anyone that would listen that he planned to visit Alaska. When Alex was leaving, Jan tried to get him to take some things with him--after he had gone, she found most of the things she had given him left behind.

9. In Chapter 6, we learn that after leaving Jan and Bob, Alex met Ron Frantz. Frantz gave him a ride to his camp at Oh-My-God Hotsprings. Frantz, who had lost his wife and only son some forty years earlier in a car accident, felt a connection with Alex. Frantz and Alex developed a relationship and spent a lot of time together. Frantz, who was a leatherworker, instructed Alex in the craft. Frantz also fed Alex. One day Alex announced that he was going to San Diego. Frantz was sad, but insisted on driving him. McCandless went on to Seattle, but returned soon to California. In California, McCandless met up with Frantz again. Alex wanted to go out to South Dakota, where Wayne Westerberg had a job waiting for him-- Frantz drove him part way there, video-taping their journey. Later, Alex wrote Frantz a letter from South Dakota, urging him to become more nomadic. Frantz took his advice, and occupied Alex’s old campsite.

10. In chapter 7, Krakauer meets with Wayne Westerberg--the man for whom Alex worked in South Dakota. Westerberg says that Alex would do the jobs that no one else wanted because they were too tedious or too dirty. Westerberg notes that Alex, however, was not mechanically inclined or imbued with common sense. While working for Westerberg, Alex became close to Westerberg’s girlfriend, Gail Borah. However, neither Westerberg nor Borah knew exactly what happened between McCandless and his family. Borah confirms Jan Burres’s analysis of Alex’s personality: he often kept to himself but could be a lot of fun in a crowd. One night Borah convinced Alex to dance with her in a bar and they had a great time. Through discussions with Borah, Burres, and McCandless’s sister, Carine, Krakauer concludes that McCandless led a chaste life; he claims there is no evidence to suggest that McCandless had relations with either men or women.

11. Westerberg got the impression that Alaska would be McCandless’s last big adventure. McCandless planned to settle down and write a book about his journeys when he left Alaska. In April, Westerberg asked McCandless if he would stay in South Dakota for a few more weeks because he was shorthanded. McCandless would not even consider it; he was set on leaving. On April 27, 1992, McCandless sent postcards to his friends, showing he had arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska.

12. Krakauer's article on McCandless appears in Outside magazine, and he receives many letters suggesting that Chris might be mentally ill Other mail simply questions his judgment: "Entering the wilderness purposefully ill- prepared, and surviving a near-death experience does not make you a better human, it makes you damn lucky," wrote one reader. Another reader asks, "Why would anyone intending to 'live off the land for a few months' forget Boy Scout rule number one: Be Prepared?“ This chapter discusses three other adventurers like McCandless (Gene Rosselini, John Waterman, and Carl McCunn) who traveled to Alaska to live off the land and failed In this chapter Krakuer questions why those individuals — and, by extension, McCandless himself — thought they could live a simple life in a harsh landscape.

13. Author Krakauer quotes a letter written by Everett Reuss, an artistic resident of Utah who disappeared into the desert of the American Southwest in 1934: "The beauty of this country is becoming part of me. I feel more detached from life and somehow gentler. I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly.“ Krakauer suggests that this letter sounds as if it could have been written by McCandless Like McCandless, Reuss also changed his name, at first requesting that his family call him Lan Rameau, and then changing his identity once again, to Evert Rulan. Additionally, Reuss identified so strongly with Jules Verne's science fiction that he frequently referred to himself as Captain Nemo, the character who flees civilization in Verne's novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

14. The last evidence of Everett Reuss was found in Davis Gulch, along the Colorado River in Utah, where he inscribed "NEMO 1934"in stone on the entrance to an ancient Anasazi Indian granary. Reuss was never found, and Krakauer lists various theories to explain his disappearance. Krakauer connects Everett Reuss and Christopher McCandless with those seeking solitude at other times, in other places, by briefly discussing the Irish monks who inhabited an island called Pepos off of Iceland. These monks created stone dwellings in the fifth and sixth centuries, hundreds of years before the Anasazi built their desert structures in Davis Gulch.

15. Alaska State Troopers had a difficult time identifying Chris McCandless’s body. However, when the story ran in the paper, Jim Gallien was certain it was “Alex.” Gallien called police and described Alex; police finally believed Gallien when they saw his name in Chris’s journal. Soon after, Wayne Westerberg heard radio talk-show host Paul Harvey discussing a kid who starved to death in Alaska. Westerberg called Alaska State Troopers to tell them what he knew about Alex. Police were having difficulty discerning who had actually known the dead hiker, since they received over 150 calls from people claiming to be a friend or family member. Westerberg insisted he knew the hiker and could provide his Social Security number (from a W-4 form). With this information, police were able to contact Chris’s bother, Sam, in Virginia.

16. Krakauer interviews Walt McCandless at home after his son's body is recovered from the abandoned bus. Walt wonders how "... a kid with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain.“ Krakauer reflects on the dynamics that might have caused a break between father (and mother) and son, why he stayed out of touch with his parents for two entire years. Like his son, Walt McCandless was an intense individual, often mercurial and at times brooding. A NASA scientist and radar specialist, he was considered brilliant by his colleagues. Chris was smart and was placed in an accelerated school program for gifted students — a program eight-year-old Chris tried to get out of since he didn't want to do the extra schoolwork associated with it. His parents worked hard and weren't often available to Chris and his younger sister Carine.

17. Additionally, with both parents working together on a consulting venture, the atmosphere around the house was often tense. But the family traveled frequently together, buying an Airstream trailer and taking to the road. Carine McCandless recalls, "There was always a little wanderlust in the family, and it was clear early on that Chris had inherited it.“ Though small, Chris was strong for his size and well-coordinated. He had trouble following rules. At the age of 10, McCandless began to run competitively, and in his teens he became a top distance runner in his region. He became interested in ending apartheid (racial segregation) in South Africa, and in his senior year of high school, McCandless started talking to friends about smuggling arms into South Africa so they could join the struggle against apartheid.

18. Concerned as well about hunger in America, he bought and distributed hamburgers to indigents in Washington, D.C. McCandless once arranged to let a homeless man live in the trailer his parents had parked near their house. After high school, he was offered a job working in Annandale, but he declined, instead driving across the country before leaving for Emory University in Atlanta.

19. Chapter 12 continues to explore McCandless's character and how it was formed during his youth. Krakauer tells the reader that McCandless took a road trip the summer before his freshman year of college. He promised to call his parents every three days, but soon stopped phoning them altogether. When he returned home, McCandless was almost unrecognizable — seriously underweight and with long, unruly hair. He had lost his way in the Mojave Desert and nearly died of dehydration. His parents tried to counsel McCandless to prevent the situation from ever repeating itself, but he didn't pay attention. McCandless received near-perfect grades during his first year of college. He wrote for the school newspaper and considered attending law school. But the summer after his second year at Emory, McCandless's personality appeared to have grown markedly different.

20. Krakauer traces McCandless's "smoldering anger" to the fact that during his earlier drive out west, McCandless had revisited his childhood home in El Segundo, California, and discovered that his father had lived a double life for several years. Chris had been born to his mother, Billie, while father Walt was still married to his first wife, Marcia. And two years after Chris was born, Walt McCandless fathered another child with Marcia. Discovering this duplicity infuriated McCandless. "But he did not confront his parents with what he knew," Krakauer writes. "He chose instead to make a secret of his dark knowledge and express his rage obliquely, in silence and sullen withdrawal.“ After his junior year, McCandless took another road trip, this time driving all the way to Alaska.

21. Back at Emory for his senior year, he began to withdraw from both friends and family. After his graduation, he ceased altogether to communicate with his parents and the sister with whom he had been close. As the months passed with no word from her son, Billie McCandless worried more and more. One night in July 1992, she awoke in the middle of the night, certain she had heard her son's voice begging "Mom! Help me!"

22. In this chapter, Krakauer interviews Carine McCandless, Chris's younger sister and, until he graduated from college, his confidante. Ten months after her brother's death, Carine can't get through a day without crying about her brother. Carine and her husband were notified of Chris's death shortly after his body was discovered in the Sushana River bus. They traveled to Alaska to bring home Chris's ashes, in Carine's knapsack. Chris's mother, Billie, is in shock over her son's death "... weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure."

23. Based on his own experiences in Alaska when he was a stubborn, headstrong young man, author Jon Krakauer arrives at the conclusion that McCandless's death wasn't suicide or even the result of an unconscious death wish, but rather an accident. His conclusion is based on the evidence provided by McCandless's journals — as well as the author's personal experience. The majority of this chapter is devoted to Krakauer's reminiscences about his own youthful obsession with mountain climbing. At 23, for reasons not dissimilar to those that drove McCandless to head into the wilderness, Krakauer decided to climb a rock formation called the Devils Thumb, on Alaska's Stikine Ice Cap. Having reached Alaska on a fishing boat, Krakauer meets a woman who puts him up for the night before he sets out to scale the Devils Thumb. During his first two days of climbing, along a glacier at the base of the rock formation, Krakauer makes genuine progress.

24. On his third day, however, high winds, stinging sheets of snow, and reduced visibility cause a series of dangerous mishaps. After almost falling into a glacial crevasse, Krakauer sets up camp on a plateau. Krakauer has arranged ahead of time for supplies to be air-dropped to him so that he can continue his climb. But the pilot engaged to deliver the supplies misreads the altitude, almost entirely missing Krakauer's encampment. Krakauer continues to climb up the glacier. He can now see 3,700 feet below him. "The sour taste of panic rose in my throat," he recalls. "My eyesight blurred, I began to hyperventilate, my calves started to shake... Awkwardly, stiff with fear, I started working my way back down. The climb was over. The only place to go was down."

25. This chapter continues the author's description of his attempted ascent of the Devils Thumb as a young man. Krakauer is forced to remain inside his tent for three days due to high winds and snow. Though he still hasn't reached the summit — and because he may never do so — Krakauer decides to smoke a celebratory marijuana cigar he had been saving. In doing so, he almost burns down the tent, which has been borrowed from his father. Due to fire damage, the temperature inside the tent drops 30 degrees. Next, the author reminisces about his autocratic but generous and loving father. A physician, Lewis Krakauer wanted his son to become a doctor, as well, and groomed him from the time he was a toddler for that profession. Father and son clashed as Jon entered his teens and then young adulthood. Victim of a childhood bout with polio, Lewis begins experiencing symptoms of the disease again in middle age. In medicating himself, he became addicted to a variety of painkillers and eventually attempted suicide. The author contemplates that the off-kilter ambition he inherited from his father is what prevented him "from admitting defeat on the Stikine Ice Cap after my initial attempt to climb the Thumb had failed, even after I nearly burned the tent down." Prevented by a large storm from reaching the summit, Krakauer huddles inside a bivouac sack while avalanches bury the ledge he balances on. He tunnels out four times; the fifth time, he retreats. But the mountain has not defeated Krakauer yet. He decides to climb the Devils Thumb via another route, up the side he had planned on descending. Eventually he reaches the summit.

26. Christopher McCandless pauses in his odyssey to visit the Liard River Hot Springs at the threshold of the Yukon Territory. But after taking time to soak in the steaming waters, he can't find another ride. He spends two days at the Liard River before making friends with Gaylord Stuckey, a truck driver who reluctantly gives "Alex" a ride. They converse for the few days the drive takes — discussing McCandless's family, his father's bigamy, and his own desire to live off the land. On April 25, Stuckey buys a bag of rice for McCandless and then drives him to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where McCandless wants to look up books on edible plants at the library. Knowing the local seasons better than McCandless, Stuckey points out "Alex, you're too early. There's still two foot, three foot of snow on the ground. There's nothing growing yet." But McCandless ignores this advice. He agrees to send Stuckey a letter when he returns from Alaska but shrugs off Stuckey's suggestion that he call his parents to let them know where he is. McCandless spends two days and three nights around Fairbanks, mostly at the university. He finds a field guide to the area's edible plants, writes postcards to Wayne Westerberg and Jan Burres, and buys a used gun (a semiautomatic,.22-caliber Remington) he has located in the classifieds. He leaves the university campus and pitches his tent on frozen ground not far from the road that will take him to the Stampede Trail.

27. On April 28, 1992, McCandless hitches the ride with Jim Gallien that will bring him there. Tramping through the bush, McCandless soon discovers the abandoned bus along the Sushana River and celebrates the discovery by writing in his journal "Magic Bus Day." At first, he has some difficulty killing small game. After about a month, though, McCandless is routinely shooting and eating squirrels, porcupines, and spruce grouses. He devours local lingonberries and rose hips and climbs a nearby butte. On June 9, 1992, McCandless kills a moose, and he is so proud of this feat that he takes a photo of the carcass. He spends days trying to cure its meat so he can consume every part of the moose. But he preserves the meat incorrectly, with the result that it becomes infested with vermin and therefore inedible. McCandless must leave the moose carcass for the wolves, which leaves him feeling deeply guilty. McCandless lists the preparations necessary for leaving the bus, bringing his "final and greatest adventure" to a close. He has made some fatal errors, however. Halfway back to the road, he discovers a three-acre lake in his way. When he first crossed the same area in April, the series of beaver ponds leading up to the Teklanika River had been frozen over and were easy enough to traverse; now, in July, these same beaver ponds have melted. Moreover, the river itself, knee- deep at winter's end, has become a raging torrent — and McCandless is a weak swimmer. He returns to the bus, chastened, and writes in his journal, "Disaster.... Rained in. River look (sic) impossible. Lonely, scared." McCandless does not know — because he refused to obtain a map of the area — that the river is passable only one mile upstream.

28. The author revisits the Teklanika River one year and one week after Christopher McCandless decided not to cross it. Krakauer, however, is well-equipped to ford the river. Accompanied by three accomplished outdoorsmen, the author also is in possession of a detailed topographical map, which reveals that a half-mile downstream from where McCandless tried to cross, there is a gauging station built by the U.S. Geological Survey. The station can't be seen from the Stampede Trail, but after hiking through thick bush, Krakauer and his friends reach it and locate a steel cable. The cable stretches between a 15-foot tower on one side of the river and an outcrop on the opposite shore. Krakauer explains, "Hydrologists traveled back and forth above the river by means of an aluminum basket that is suspended from the cable with pulleys," — a means by which McCandless could have crossed the engorged river. The author wonders why McCandless didn't attempt another crossing of the Teklanika the next month, in August, instead of staying inside the bus and starving to death. Krakauer and his friends cross the river, and after a long trek they come upon the Sushana River bus. The author inventories its contents: a bag of bird feathers, perhaps meant for insulating McCandless's clothes; a kerosene lamp; Ronald Franz' machete sheath; books; a stove fashioned out of an old oil drum; jeans padded with silver duct tape; hiking boots; toenail clippers; a nylon tent spread across a gaping hole in the bus's window. Krakauer and his companions ruminate about McCandless's demise — was he merely a "loopy young man who read too many books and lacked even a modicum of common sense?" Small in stature, did McCandless feel he had to prove his manhood by means of extreme physical challenges? Ultimately Krakauer seems to believe that McCandless wasn't consumed by existential despair, but driven by meaning and purpose. He distrusted the value of things that came easily. "He demanded much of himself," the author writes, " — more, in the end, than he could deliver."

29. On July 8, 1992, McCandless returns to the bus. He resumes hunting small game and gathering edible berries and wild potatoes, but he is burning more calories than he consumes. He reads Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and finishes Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, writing "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED." — a striking sentiment from someone so relentlessly compelled toward solitude. On July 30, McCandless makes an ominous entry in his journal: "EXTREMELY WEAK, FAULT OF POT. SEED. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP. STARVING. GREAT JEOPARDY." Krakauer points out that until this journal entry, nothing suggests that McCandless is in danger of starving to death. Though hungry, he is otherwise in good health. Less than one month later, he will be dead. How? Wayne Westerberg suggests that McCandless ate some potato seeds he bought in South Dakota; potato seeds can become toxic once they have sprouted. But he would have needed to eat many pounds of these seeds, and he doesn't seem to have done so. There is, however, a wild potato that McCandless may have foraged for — and confused with the similar-looking, and toxic, wild sweet pea. The author imagines a hungry McCandless mistaking one plant for the other and becoming incapacitated. Already worn down by a subsistence diet, his body wasn't able to stave off the emetic effects of the plant, which ultimately killed him. As time goes on, however, Krakauer begins to doubt this hypothesis. Some four years after McCandless's death, Krakauer finally discovers that a toxic mold can grow on legumes. "I had an epiphany," he writes. "It wasn't the seeds of the wild potato that had done McCandless in; he was probably killed instead by mold that had been growing on those seeds.”

30. Krakauer describes the effects of poisoning by the mold: "The body is prevented from turning what it eats into a source of usable energy. If you ingest too much... you are bound to starve, no matter how much food you put into your stomach." On August 5, McCandless notes in his journal that he has spent 100 days in the wild. Then he writes "BUT IN WEAKEST CONDITION OF LIFE. DEATH LOOMS AS SERIOUS THREAT." Again the author points out McCandless's folly in not having a topographical map: only six miles south of the bus was a Park Service cabin, equipped with first-aid supplies, bedding, and emergency food — a three-hour walk away. Krakauer, however, notes that even the existence of this cabin would not have saved McCandless, since the cabin had been recently vandalized, and anything edible within had been exposed to wild animals and the weather. McCandless writes his final journal entry on August 12. Barely a week later, he tears a page out of Western author Louis L'Amour's memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, that quotes a poem by Robinson Jeffers, "Wise Men in Their Bad Hours." On the back of this page, McCandless writes, "I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL."