THE OBSIDIAN REGISTRY · TEXT MIRROR · no images, no scripts · index · full site · mirrors
FILE 115 · VOL XIX · Nobody Came Back Out
The Army Airlifted the Magic Bus Out of Alaska. They Forgot the Passenger.
People kept walking in to see where he died. Some of them did not walk out.
Based on: Bus 142 and Into the Wild
Intake record
| Recovered from | Bench seat removed during restoration, University of Alaska Museum of the North, Fairbanks |
|---|---|
| Contents | A guest logbook hidden in the seat frame, a ranger's rescue report, a disposable camera with 24 exposures, a typed note on Army letterhead |
| Finder | Lydia Kerr, museum conservation technician |
| Status | The 1992 death and 2020 removal are documented. The logbook's last 40 pages are not. |
Recovered file
In April 1992, a 24-year-old college graduate from Virginia hitchhiked to the edge of Denali National Park in Alaska and walked into the wilderness along an old mining track called the Stampede Trail. He had given away his savings, abandoned his car, and stopped talking to his family. He wanted to live off the land. [1]
About twenty miles in, he found an old green-and-white city bus. A road crew had left it there in the 1960s as a shelter. He moved in. He hunted. He gathered plants. He kept a journal. [1]
In July, he tried to walk out. The Teklanika River, which he had waded across easily in April, was now a raging torrent of snowmelt. He could not cross. He went back to the bus. [1]
In September 1992, moose hunters found his body in the bus. He weighed about 67 pounds. He had died of starvation, possibly worsened by eating a plant that made it harder for his body to use food. [1] Near the door he had left a note asking for help. [1]
His name was Christopher McCandless. The writer Jon Krakauer told his story, first in a magazine and then in the 1996 book Into the Wild. In 2007 it became a movie. [1]
And people started going to the bus.
Thousands came over the years. Many were young. Some came to honor him. Some came because they felt the same pull he had felt. Many were not ready for the river.
Hikers had to be rescued again and again. In 2010, a Swiss woman drowned crossing the Teklanika. In 2019, a newlywed woman from Belarus drowned in the same river on the way to the bus. [2]
In June 2020, Alaska decided enough was enough. An Army National Guard helicopter lifted the bus out of the wilderness on a cable and flew it away. [2] It now belongs to the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks, which is preserving it carefully, like a sacred object. [3]
The bus left the woods. Not everything on it did.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 115 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.