In September of 1992, in an abandoned bus on the bank of the Sushana River in Alaska, three moose hunters discovered a decomposing human body wrapped in a sleeping bag, surrounded by possessions that included a rifle, a camera, and, written on the pages of a book used to identify edible plants, a diary that detailed an increasingly desperate, 113-day fight for survival in the wilderness. That body was later identified as Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old adventurer born in Inglewood, California, whose tragic story would later be retold in Into the Wild, a bestselling book by Jon Krakauer, and a Hollywood movie of the same name. Although it was initially thought that McCandless simply starved to death, Krakauer believes that the following diary entry, written by McCandless on the 94th day, offers a different theory: that he ingested the toxic seeds of the Eskimo potato plant in his final days and weeks.

The Diary Entry

[30th July 1992]

WOODPECKER

FROG

EXTREMELY WEAK

FAULT OF POT. SEED

MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP

STARVING

GREAT JEOPARDY

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Further Reading

A selection of Chris McCandless’ diary entries are reprinted in Krakauer’s bestselling book, Into the Wild, first published in 1996 by Villard.

Also…

• ‘How Chris McCandless died’ (The New Yorker)
• Chris McCandless’ obituary in the New York Times
• ‘Bus 142,’ in which Chris McCandless perished, became a (dangerous) tourist hotspot after Into the Wild was published and in 2020 was airlifted to the Museum of the North in Alaska
• Chris McCandless on Wikipedia