Teklanika River, Denali National Park, Alaska.
LightRocket via Getty Images
The adventurous life and tragic death of Christopher McCandless in the Alaskan wilderness was popularized by author Jon Krakauer in his 1996 novel Into the Wild and a 2007 film adaptation. At age 24, McCandless gave away all his life savings and possessions, adopting a vagabond lifestyle and living off the land. After traveling the U.S. and Mexico, in spring 1992, he ventured north into the Alaskan wilderness, where he found shelter in an abandoned bus along an old mine road. In July, after living in the bus for a little over two months, he decided to head back to civilization, but according to his journal's entry, the trail was blocked by the now impassable Teklanika River. At this point, McCandless headed back to the bus and re-established his camp. After being stranded in the wilderness for 113 days, McCandless likely died in late August of hunger and exhaustion.
Three decades after Christopher McCandless' untimely death, hydrologists of the Oregon State University (OSU) conclude that McCandless was a victim of an intense, but short-lived runoff event from the Cantwell Glacier.
"Mr. McCandless had unfortunate timing," says David Hill, a professor of civil engineering at OSU. "The specific day of his attempted crossing—July 5, 1992—coincided with a large amount of rainfall-driven runoff. Had his attempt occurred a bit on either side of that day, the conditions might have been more favorable and the outcome may have been different for him."
How much water flows in a stream at any given time is determined by a combination of many factors, Hill explains, including precipitation, snowmelt and evaporation, as well as infiltration of water into the soil.
"Those and many other complex processes determine the places water goes, how much of it goes where, and when it goes. The two most significant drivers of streamflow are the patterns of precipitation and temperature."
Using all of the relevant data they could obtain involving weather, land cover and elevation, Hill and co-author Christina Aragon applied a collection of computer models that have been widely used in snowy, high-latitude locations including Alaska. The goal was to compare the 1992 hydrology of the Alaska Range to other years and the July 5, 1992, Teklanika River conditions to the days before and after.
"The spring snowmelt in 1992 was delayed, which kept flows in the Teklanika relatively low and made it possible for Mr. McCandless to cross the river and reach Bus 142 at the end of April," according to Aragon. "When the snowmelt finally happened, it happened fast. After that, the river got higher or lower on roughly a weekly basis depending on rain in the region. Streamflow in summer 1992 was more variable than usual because of the quick snowmelt followed by periods of heavy rain."
For the 1992 water year the Teklanika watershed received 68 centimeters of precipitation, 20 percent greater than average. Also in 1992, mean daily temperature was a month slower than usual in rising above freezing, and summer rainfall was more intense than it normally is.
Exactly what that means in terms of streamflow and river hydraulics is hard to know, the researchers note, partly because of the difficulties associated with river monitoring in the nation's largest, wildest state.
"Alaska is a challenge in terms of long-term gauging datasets," Aragon continues. "Remoteness, harshness and sheer scale mean many river basins are not gauged with the same coverage as those in the lower 48. The U.S. Geological Survey maintained a gauge on the Teklanika River for 10 consecutive years, but that ended in 1974."
Although the paper can't determine with certainty whether McCandless would have been able to safely exit the wild if he'd tried to cross the Teklanika River again at a later date, the study's results are worthy of consideration.
"David and Christina's paper is fascinating to me for deeply personal reasons," so Into the Wild author Krakauer. "Over the three decades that have passed since Chris McCandless perished in Alaska, I've been eager to learn as much as possible about his experience from the moment he 'walked into the wild' in April 1992 until his death inside Bus 142 some four months later. This paper sheds a little more light about a key event during that period—his attempt to return to civilization halfway through his Alaska adventure."
"Perhaps even more importantly, the paper conveys valuable information about the dynamics of Alaska's rivers—the fording of which has always struck me as one of the most dangerous aspects of backcountry travel in Alaska, based on close calls I personally had on numerous trips into Brooks Range, the Alaska Range and the Coast Mountains of Southeast Alaska. David and Christina's paper might help other adventurers avoid calamity going forward," Krakauer concludes.
In the years following McCandless' death and the Into the Wild book and movie, two hikers died in the river trying to visit the now famous bus. Many others needed to be rescued, finally prompting the state of Alaska to enlist the National Guard to airlift it from the Stampede Trail with a Chinook helicopter on June 18, 2020. The 1946 International Harvester model K-5 is now on display at the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks.
The paper "Stuck in the Wild—The Hydrology of the Teklanika River (Alaska) in the Summer of 1992" is published in Frontiers in Earth Science (2022). Materials provided by the Oregon State University.