Into The Wild : Fairbanks

Chapter X : FAIRBANKS

Dying in the wild, a hiker recorded the terror

Anchorage, Sept. 12 (AP)—Last Sunday a young hiker, stranded by an injury, was found dead at a remote camp in the Alaskan interior. No one is yet certain who he was. But his diary and two notes found at the camp tell a wrenching story of his desperate and progressively futile efforts to survive. The diary indicates that the man, believed to be an American in his late 20's or early 30's, might have been injured in a fall and that he was then stranded at the camp for more than three months. It tells how he tried to save himself by hunting game and eating wild plants while nonetheless getting weaker. One of his two notes is a plea for help, addressed to anyone who might come upon the camp while the hiker searched the surrounding area for food. The second note bids the world goodbye…

An autopsy at the state coroner's office in Fairbanks this week found that the man had died of starvation, probably in late July. The authorities discovered among the man's possessions a name that they believe is his. But they have so far been unable to confirm his identity and, until they do, have declined to disclose the name.

The New York Times, September13, 1992

By the time The New York Times picked up the story about the hiker, the Alaska State Troopers had been trying for a week to figure out who he was. When he died, McCandless was wearing a blue sweatshirt printed with the logo of a Santa Barbara towing company; when contacted, the wrecking outfit professed to know nothing about him or how he'd acquired the shirt. Many of the entries in the brief, perplexing diary recovered with the body were terse observations of flora and fauna, which fueled speculation that McCandless was a field biologist. But that ultimately led nowhere, too.

On September 10, three days before news of the dead hiker appeared in the Times, the story was published on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News. When Jim Gallien saw the headline and the accompanying map indicating that the body had been found twenty-five miles west of Healy on the Stampede Trail, he felt the hairs bristle across the base of his scalp: Alex. Gallien still held a picture in his mind of the odd, congenial youth striding down the trail in boots two sizes too big for him—Gallien s own boots, the old brown Xtratufs he'd persuaded the kid to take. "From the newspaper article, what little information there was, it sounded like the same person," says Gallien, "so I called the state troopers and said, 'Hey, I think I gave that guy a ride.' " "OK, sure," replied trooper Roger Ellis, the cop on the other end of the line. "What makes you think so? You're the sixth person in the last hour who's called to say they know the hiker's identity." But Gallien persisted, and the more he talked, the more Ellis's skepticism receded. Gallien described several pieces of equipment not mentioned in the newspaper account that matched gear found with the body. And then Ellis noticed that the first cryptic entry in the hiker's journal read, "Exit Fairbanks. Sitting Galliean. Rabbit Day."

The troopers had by this time developed the roll of film in the hiker's Minolta, which included several apparent self-portraits. "When they brought the pictures out to the job site where I was working," says Gallien, "there was no two ways about it. The guy in the pictures was Alex." Because McCandless had told Gallien he was from South Dakota, the troopers immediately shifted their search there for the hiker's next of kin. An all-points bulletin turned up a missing person named McCandless from eastern South Dakota, coincidentally from a small town only twenty miles from Wayne Westerberg's home in Carthage, and for a while the troopers thought they'd found their man. But this, too, turned out to be a false lead.

Westerberg had heard nothing from the friend he knew as Alex McCandless since receiving the postcard from Fairbanks the previous spring. On September 13, he was rolling down an empty ribbon of blacktop outside Jamestown, North Dakota, leading his harvest crew home to Carthage after wrapping up the four-month cutting season in Montana, when the VHP barked to life. "Wayne!" an anxious voice crackled over the radio from one of the crew's other trucks. "This is Bob. You got your radio on?"

"Yeah, Bobby. Wayne here. What's up?"

"Quick—turn on your AM, and listen to Paul Harvey. He's talking about some kid who starved to death up in Alaska. The police don't know who he is. Sounds a whole lot like Alex."

Westerberg found the station in time to catch the tail end of the Paul Harvey broadcast, and he was forced to agree: The few sketchy details made the anonymous hiker sound distressingly like his friend. As soon as he got to Carthage, a dispirited Westerberg phoned the Alaska State Troopers to volunteer what he knew about McCandless. By that time, however, stories about the dead hiker, including excerpts from his diary, had been given prominent play in newspapers across the country. As a consequence the troopers were swamped with calls from people claiming to know the hiker's identity, so they were even less receptive to Westerberg than they had been to Gallien. "The cop told me they'd had more than one hundred fifty calls from folks who thought Alex was their kid, their friend, their brother," says Westerberg. "Well, by then I was kind of pissed at getting the runaround, so I told him, 'Look, I'm not just another crank caller. I know who he is. He worked for me. I think I've even got his Social Security number around here somewhere.'"

Westerberg pawed through the files at the grain elevator until he found two W-4 forms McCandless had filled out. Across the top of the first one, dating from McCandless's initial visit to Carthage, in 1990, he had scrawled "EXEMPT EXEMPT EXEMPT EXEMPT" and given his name as Iris Fucyu. Address: "None of your damn business." Social Security number: "I forget."

But on the second form, dated March 30, 1992, two weeks before he left for Alaska, he'd signed his given name: "Chris J. McCandless." And in the blank for Social Security number he'd put down, "228-31-6704." Westerberg phoned Alaska again. This time the troopers took him seriously. The Social Security number turned out to be genuine and placed McCandless's permanent residence in northern Virginia. Authorities in Alaska contacted law enforcement agencies in that state, who in turn started combing phone directories for McCand-lesses. Walt and Billie McCandless had by then moved to the Maryland shore and no longer had a Virginia phone number, but Walt's eldest child from his first marriage lived in Annandale and was in the book; late on the afternoon of September 17, Sam McCandless received a call from a Fairfax County homicide detective.

Sam, nine years older than Chris, had seen a short article about the hiker in the Washington Post a few days earlier, but, he allows, "It didn't occur to me that the hiker might be Chris. Never even crossed my mind. It's ironic because when I read the article I thought, 'Oh, my God, what a terrible tragedy. I really feel sorry for the family of this guy, whoever they are. What a sad story.' "

Sam had been raised in California and Colorado, in his mother's household, and hadn't moved to Virginia until 1987, after Chris had left the state to attend college in Atlanta, so Sam didn't know his half brother well. But when the homicide detective started asking whether the hiker sounded like anyone he knew, Sam reports, "I was pretty sure it was Chris. The fact that he'd gone to Alaska, that he'd gone off by himself—it all added up."

At the detective's request, Sam went to the Fairfax County Police Department, where an officer showed him a photograph of the hiker that had been faxed from Fairbanks. "It was an eight-by-ten enlargement," Sam recalls, "a head shot. His hair was long, and he had a beard. Chris almost always had short hair and was clean-shaven. And the face in the picture was extremely gaunt. But I knew right away. There was no doubt. It was Chris. I went home, picked up Michele, my wife, and drove out to Maryland to tell Dad and Billie. I didn't know what I was going to say. How do you tell someone that their child is dead?"