The 142 bus where Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, was killed has just been removed from its location in the remote interior of Alaska.
Last Thursday, June 18, the famous bus from Into The Wild, a book and film inspired by the diaries of Christopher McCandless aka Alex Supertramp was removed from its remote location in the Stampede Trail , 40 kilometers west of the town of Healy and very close to the Denali National Park and Preserve, by order of Alaska Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Due to the difficulty of access to the area, its removal was carried out with a CH-47 Chinook helicopter from the Alaska Army National Guard and was moved to secure storage while the DNR decides what to do with it.
Why? For security reasons.
Since the publication of the book, written by Jon Krakauer in 1995 and, above all, since the film adaptation made by Sean Penn in 2007, the rusty green and white bus in which McCandless died after 114 days living off nature in complete solitude, had become place of pilgrimage for many hikers that they wanted to reproduce his odyssey, even when they were unprepared for the rigors of the challenge. According to the Alaska National Guard, in 2010 and 2019, two hikers drowned in the Teklanika River while trying to reach the bus and in the last decade at least 15 others had to be rescued.
Popularly known as the Bus 142 , the Magic Bus or, simply, the bus from Into the Wild, this vehicle, originally part of the public transportation system of the city of Fairbanks in the 1940s, was bought by the company Yutan Construction to house your employees during the construction of the road that now connects the mining towns Lignite and Stampede and abandoned after completion of the works, in 1961.
Since then, the 142 bus has served as occasional refuge to hunters, trappers and hikers , the most famous of whom was Christopher McCandless, who after burning his ships and spending months wandering the United States, came to this remote corner of wild Alaska to lead a life on the fringes of society. He died of starvation, aged 24, on August 18, 1992.
If this news has generated interest in the Stampede Trail, you should know that even though the trail is not as technically challenging as other Alaska trails –it is not so incredibly spectacular either, everything is said in passing–, and for the most part it is easy to follow, since it follows the layout of an old road from the 30s, it is classified as difficult by the complication presented by the crossing of the Savage and Teklanika rivers, both with strong currents. The Teklanika, the more dangerous of the two, is fed by a very large basin, hidden from view on the other side of the mountains, and water levels can change rapidly without warning. For this reason, it is not recommended to do it in spring, during the thaw season.
The Stampede Trail, which starts at Eightmile Lake and ends at Stampede Creek, near the Stampede airport runway, has a journey of approximately 30 kilometers. The ascents are short –the difference in level that it overcomes is only 950 meters– and it crosses tundra landscapes, so mud and mosquitoes They are more than insured.