Chris Mccandless Essay

A moose hunter in Alaska spotted two hikers, worryingly trying to grab his attention. They pointed him out to a bus in the woods. Stumbling closer revealed the body of a young man. That body was Chris McCandless, who set out into the wilderness a few months before. He was originally thought to have just been an idiot, somebody who went out into the wild unprepared, and payed the price. Questions soon arose. Why was he there? What happened to him? In time, these questions were answered, and painted a picture of somebody different from the rest of us, somebody achieving something beyond life. Chris McCandless had traveled across the country, living nomadically while on his adventures. He had his reasons for doing what he did, and was justified

If he wasn’t smart, he would not have lived as long living the way he did. Before he went into the wild, he stopped by the University in Fairbanks, “In the campus bookstore, tucked away on the bottom shelf of the Alaska section, he came across a scholarly, exhaustively researched field guide to the regions edible plants”(Krakauer 160). Chris kept this book and studied it exhaustively to be confident that what he was eating was in fact, edible. Earlier in Chris’ adventures, he was down in Mexico, on the brink of starvation when he needed to find a way to find food and ration it to keep him alive. After being alone for 36 days, there was nobody out there that could save him. “For that entire period he subsisted on nothing but five pounds of rice and what marine life he could pull from the sea, and experience that would later convince him that he could survive on similarly meager rations in the Alaska bush”(Krakauer 36). Chris was able to learn skills and traits through these adventures and was able to keep himself alive longer in Alaska by using these new skills. Learning from previous experiences is something that many people don’t do, and they would continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. Chris did not do that, every experience on his trip made him better prepared for the next day. Chris was smart because he was able to apply his previous knowledge to learn new skills and live, in the