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Peter Frick-Wright: From ���ϳԹ��� Magazine, this is the ���ϳԹ��� Podcast.

A couple years ago, ���ϳԹ��� contributing editor Eva Holland was hiking the Stampede trail to go see the iconic Teklanika river, in Alaska.

Eva Holland:  I got up early, started hiking to the river. Along the way, I met up with a group of five hikers, seasonal workers from the businesses around the park entrance.

Peter: Eva hiked with these folks for a couple hours, about 10-15 miles. But when they finally made it to the river, it didn’t look good.

Eva: It was the first full weekend in September. It was gray. It was just like a few degrees above freezing. It had been raining on and off, and the river was scary looking.

Peter: Eva had no plans of trying to cross the river, but her new friends told her they were going to.

Eva: Two of the guys crossed first with a climbing rope that they sort of like strung out behind them tied to our side. One of them almost fell in at one point, but he sort of splashed through right at the end, and they made it across.

Peter: The first two crossed successfully, a little wet and cold, but okay.  They tied the rope up on the other side, so that the next three could cross while holding on to something.

Eva: And so these next three waded in and they got about halfway out and then one of them fell, and then another one fell, and then they were pulling, you know, the rope downstream and cutting the legs out from each other as they tried to get back up on their feet. But the rope was cutting everybody off at the knees. So they all fell and they were hanging on to the rope at first, with the water rushing over their faces. And I remember hearing one of the guys on the far shore screaming like, ‘you have to let go. You have to let go.’

So they let go. And they were all washed downstream.

Peter: The two guys on the far shore took off running. Eva sprinted after them. They were all trying to keep the three hikers in sight as they attempted to swim in the raging, freezing, river.

Eva: One of them made it to shore, probably like a hundred yards on the far side. The second one made it to shore maybe another hundred or two hundred yards later. And then, the third one, Rick, was still in the water. And he couldn't, he couldn't get to shore.

Peter: Rick was being pushed down stream. Eva was running as fast as she could, leaping over tree roots and dodging branches, trying to keep Rick in sight.

Eva: Rick had a backpack on, and it kept driving him onto his stomach. We could see the backpack driving his head under and then his face would pop out of the water and he'd like gasp for air and then he'd go under again, and it was horrifying.

So I was running, trying to keep him in sight. And at one point I had to kind of duck around a bunch of trees. So I went sort of inland and out of sight of the river for a minute and when I came back out he had somehow made it to the other side. And there was this sort of steep gravel cliff that he was just like, clinging to, like a spider, like with his feet just out of the water. And then Matt, the other guy, was able to climb down to him and help him get off this cliff and onto solid ground.

Peter: Matt and Rick limped back upstream to the other two who were huddled by a fire. They were out of any immediate danger, but it wasn’t looking good, overall. Most of their stuff was soaked and all three were scraped and bruised. One of them had a torn rotator cuff. Another had cracked his knee open. And Rick was covered in cuts and bruises with gravel embedded in his skin. They were not going back across the river.

So after screaming back and forth to make a plan, Eva started the hike back to town to let their co-workers know they needed to be rescued. But, before that could happen, some hunters with ATVs found the hikers first and gave them a lift back across the river.

Still, Eva was shaken up.

Eva: I had so much time to think about it on the hike back, because I was just retracing my steps for 10 or 15 miles by myself. I just kept thinking, I can't believe how close I just came to witnessing a death. And I kept thinking about, would they have changed their minds if I wasn't there? And maybe they wouldn't have, you know, they were, they wanted to get to the bus.

Peter: The bus. The hikers were trying to cross the river to get to Bus 142. The Chris McCandless bus. The “Into the Wild” bus.

Chris McCandless was a 24-year-old adventurer who hitchhiked and camped across the US for more than two years. In 1992, he walked into the Alaskan bush with a rifle and bag of rice and attempted to live off the land. He took shelter in a broken down Fairbanks city bus across the river. He spent the spring and summer there, but when he decided to head home, he found himself trapped by this very river, the Teklanika.

There are many theories about what happened to him next. Maybe he ate something he shouldn't have or maybe he just didn’t have enough food, but ultimately, after 134 days he starved to death. In the bus.

Two weeks later moose hunters found his body.

���ϳԹ��� covered the story in the magazine, with a feature by Jon Krakauer. That story was turned into a book and that book became a Hollywood movie. Each time the story has taken a new form, the global audience has grown, and the story has evolved. Every time it seems like the story is over, something else happens. Eva has been writing about Chris McCandless for nearly two decades.

Today on The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast: the latest chapter. The final resting place of Bus 142.

Producer Steph Brown takes it from here.

Steph Brown: Chris McCandless was an honors graduate of Emory University, an accomplished athlete and a stubborn idealist. Before he set out on his adventure, he donated his savings, 24,000 dollars to charity, burned all of his cash and changed his name. He went by Alexander Supertramp or Alex on the road and he didn’t tell his family or his friends where he was going. He traveled with books written by Thoreau, Tolstoy and Jack London. And in his journal he wrote messages like “no phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes, ultimate freedom.”

He was an idealist, a rebel and an explorer. And so, when Jon Krakauer’s ���ϳԹ��� feature came out, for many it really struck a chord..

Eva: Some people, like, like Krakauer himself, see themselves in Chris . There's sort of youthful dreams and ambitions and, and adventurous streaks. Some people, I think, wish they were more like Chris in terms of pursuing an unconventional life or living outside the norms. So, it's what he represents, it's the ideas he was trying to live out that, that really resonate with a lot of people. Um I have not traditionally been one of those people, who, who resonated with it super strongly. But, but I know a lot of people do and I've always been interested in why this story holds so much power over people.

Steph: Eva herself wasn’t a follower. But she was interested in the followers. The story holds so much power, that every year, people try and retrace Chris’ steps to see the bus. These adventure seekers even have a name – Pilgrims. We don’t know how many pilgrims have visited the bus, but definitely hundreds, possibly a few thousand. And unfortunately, many of these pilgrims have learned what Chris did - that the Teklanika is dangerous.

Eva: A number of them needed rescue. It's hard to put exact numbers on that. I spoke to a local volunteer fire chief in 2013 who said he had rescued a dozen people that summer alone.

Steph: And of course, not every incident goes in the records. Like the near-miss that Eva witnessed — with Rick and his friends.

There also have been two deaths involving pilgrims over the years.

Eva: One woman drowned in 2010 in the Teklanika. And a second woman drowned in 2019, also in the Teklanika.

Steph: For a while, it seemed like no matter what happened, no matter what consequences there were, people were going to keep. visiting. the. bus.

Eva: I don't think people were really thinking, like, this is worth risking my life for. Some of them might be really devoted to the story because some people really feel that the book and the movie changed their lives. But I think most people were thinking, you know, I know other people who've done this, or I've heard of other people doing this, I can do it, and I'll be safe.

Steph: Over the years, there’s been a backlash against Chris. And his story’s most recognizable symbol: the bus.

Eva: It's not just Alaskans.  I'm sure they're I'm sure there are other people who the story left them cold or they found it frustrating or or a waste rather than admirable but there's, there's definitely sort of a well known strain of response in Alaska of skepticism to the story, or even a degree of like, you know, we could, we could loosely call that group sort of the haters, you know.

The group that says, you know, this kid came in from outside, he was unprepared, and he paid the price and it's nothing to admire it's nothing to to celebrate.

Steph: This camp—the hater camp—surprisingly, it’s where Eva herself started out.

Eva: I felt like I should be into the story because I moved to the yukon when I was 27. It was my big adventure, you know going off on my own into the big world, and I was learning to get into the backcountry myself. But I just, it was always a little extreme for me. Um, I sort of thought, I was like, well, why do you have to go full live off the land and never speak to anyone from before, you know leaving your family behind and not contacting them?

Steph: Even as a backpacker herself, Chris’s story didn’t really speak to Eva. She couldn’t understand or relate to the decision to cut off his family and friends. But, Eva’s opinion of Chris began to shift in 2014, when more than 20 years after his passing, Chris’s younger sister Carine published her own book, The Wild Truth.

Carine: I wrote the wild truth to share the rest of the story finally, and Chris deserved that.

Steph: The Wild Truth exposes the violent and abusive household that Chris and Carine grew up in and the revelation that they were the product of an affair and technically illegitimate. Carine explains that it wasn't just the philosophy of Thoreau and Tolstoy that led Chris into the wild. It was also this toxic environment — and the tendency for her parents to try to redeem themselves with money.

Carine: When people look at the entire story, it fills in so many blank spaces about Chris and his motivations and better balancing the understanding of his actions.

Steph: Whether you’re enamored by the Chris McCandless story, and curious about visiting the bus someday, or think he stood for something too extreme and misguided, the bus was a lasting symbol of that story, sitting out in the wilderness, marking the spot where it all happened. That is, until one day when Carine got a phone call that changed everything.

Carine: June 18th, 2020.  In the middle of my workday, I got a call from the Alaska DNR commissioner. That the bus was at that moment suspended beneath a Chinook helicopter, um, floating above the Stampede Trail.

Steph: The commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources called to tell Carine that the Into the Wild bus was coming out of the wild. The commissioner wanted to give her time to digest the news before they notified the public.

Carine: She was explaining what they had done and why, and I'm trying to envision the bus dangling. Having been there myself all these visuals and emotions are going through my head. And at the same time, my phone was just constantly pinging.

Steph: Carine didn’t need to look at her phone to know what the pinging was.

Carine: You can't strap an iconic symbol like that beneath a Chinook and think that no one's going to take notice.

, : An abandoned bus that was made famous by the John Krakauer book and subsequent movie Into the Wild has been airlifted near a national park in Alaska.

: Alaska officials said that too many people were putting themselves at risk trekking to the remote site where McCandles died of starvation in 1992

Steph: Melanie Hall, a resident of the area, had gone for a walk on Stampede road when she saw the helicopter. She took a photo of the bus hanging in the air and the internet did the rest. Carine was shocked, but she quickly went into action mode.

Carine: I knew that very quickly I would have to interrupt whatever else I had going on that day and get online and address a very sad and angry global audience, many of whom thought I had some sort of power to just tell them to put it back. For months I continued to receive messages from people saying, you know, how could I, as his sister, let this happen? And I needed to save my brother's bus.

Steph: Carine received hundreds of messages on her socials and emails reacting to the news. Because this bus, it’s not just a bus.

Carine: So many people have shared how his story has impacted their lives in such positive ways. His story was the spark that ignited them to change their own lives and to escape toxic situations and remove themselves from destructive relationships or habits. And at the center of all of that sits this symbolical bus. So when this symbol of that is in their minds taken away from them, they feel like they've lost something.

Steph: Carine knew the history of the pilgrims, the tragedies and the rescues. And so she knew the State had been talking about a solution,  either building a bridge over the river or airlifting the bus out of there entirely. In fact, Carine’s non-profit, Friends of Bus 142, has spent significant time trying to convince people not to go to the bus and to take alternative hikes to commemorate Chris.

And yet, through all the years of that talk she never imagined the bus actually being gone.

Carine: His loss, his memory, um, what he means to so many people. It's timeless. I don’t know. It just never entered my consciousness that it was gonna,  uh, not be there someday.

Steph: Carine was not alone in this feeling. Even for a skeptic like Eva, it felt like the end of something.

Eva: I was surprised, but then I also thought, oh, this was the perfect moment for them to do this, you know, when everybody's kind of busy with other things, like a global pandemic. But I, I remember thinking like, oh, it's over. After all these years, the story's over.

Steph: After the break, the part of the story that comes after the end of the story.

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Steph: So it turns out if you want to hide the fact that you’re dragging a famous bus out of the wild, dangling it underneath a helicopter is not a great way to avoid detection. People seem to notice a flying bus.

Eva: So the, the director of, of Museum of the North saw the, saw the pictures going viral the same day I did and, and his staff and him as well said, well, well, what's going to happen to the bus?

Steph: Where do you put a symbol of survival, idealism, adventure, and the wild? One that draws visitors from around the world?

Eva: Their mandate as the Museum of the North is to document Northern stories from all around the circumpolar region, but their specific area of expertise is interior Alaska. And so they thought this bus is a really important piece of interior Alaska history, and so they threw their hat in the ring. they put in an application to become the custodians of the bus. And they were successful.

Steph: The Alaskan Department of Resources, who owned the bus, also had very specific requirements for who could receive it. And one of those was for the bus to be safely accessible to the public at no cost. And so the Museum was a great fit for that.

The Museum of the North was granted a 50,000 dollar federal loan called the Save America's Treasures Fund to restore the bus and to create a museum exhibit. And Eva was given yet another chance to write about the bus that she has followed for 16 years.

Eva: I was really excited. I'm, uh, kind of a museum nerd and a history nerd. Um, so I was really excited to geek out on like, um, the process of building an exhibit, which I know isn't like everybody's jam.

But I also knew that they had a tough job to try to honor Chris's story and please the existing fandom of the bus with the way they treat it. But also use the bus, to tell a larger story about Alaska and to talk about the bus's history before Chris arrived and to reach out to Alaskans who might be skeptical of the bus as being an important or historical object and say, no, it is, here's all this history that's attached to it that has nothing to do with Chris McCandless.

And so that's, that's like a tightrope walk right to, to sort of make the bus into something for everyone. And so I was really interested in how they were going to navigate those tensions.

Steph: So in July, Eva went to Fairbanks to speak to the museum staff about their plans for the exhibit and to see how they are going to use the bus to tell stories about Alaska.

Eva:  We're in business.

Angela Lin: Yay.

Steph: One of the first people Eva met was Angela Lin, the senior collections manager and the project lead for the bus exhibit.

Angela: My job is to acknowledge and to present things that are iconic to Alaska history. Yeah. It can't get a whole lot more iconic, you know, than this thing, for better or worse.

Steph: Angela took Eva to the engineering facility at the University of Alaska to see the bus. And it was in rough shape. Eva told me she was surprised that it held together in the airlift at all.

Eva: Okay. So what has been done to it?

Angela: Yeah so the first thing that they did was to just strip the floor down to bare metal. We had to just get rid of all that stuff because it was full of mold.

Steph: The bus was obviously rusty from being outside, but it had also been loved to death. Eva told me, there was a piece of the bus where someone had taken something like a can opener and just carved out a chunk of the metal.

Angela: And just cut that off and took it home with them like a relic, you know, And so again, taking advantage of an opportunity to tell a story about why there's no steering wheel, why there's broken glass. Why people are calling me, asking me to buy, make for a donation, giving me pieces of the bus. Like, what is that need that people have, not only to touch it, but to take pieces away.

Steph: The team spent four months cleaning the bus. They scraped away moss, pulled up carpet and put in new windows. And while they were trying to stabilize the bus, they were also actively trying not to make any drastic changes.

Eva: I just assumed for some reason that they would turn back the clock, you know, that they would recreate the bus as it was in 1960, or in 1992 when Chris lived there. But they didn't. What they did is called conservation rather than restoration and it means just freezing it in place as it is. They didn’t try to erase any of the damage, they just tried to stop the bus from rotting away.

Steph: Freezing the bus in time meant a lot of individual decisions, each influencing how the public would experience the bus. The team fixed some damages and left others. For instance, they decided to keep the cuts that the helicopter made into the top of the bus.

Angela: That's a scar on the physical bus. It's a really, that's like the most dramatic thing that happened, and traumatic, to the structure of the bus, is having those massive holes cut into it, and then hauling it out in the helicopter. That was a really hard thing for the bus, and so that was, you know, our ability then to kind of honor that history of it.

Steph: Some decisions were easy. The museum staff kept all of the graffiti and didn’t put back a steering wheel or an engine. But others were more difficult, like what to do with the number 142 written on the side of the bus.

Eva: If you've seen the famous portrait that Chris shot of himself,  sitting back in a camp chair against the bus, you can see the black letters 142. That was when the bus was a city transit bus in Fairbanks, which was its last job before it went into the backcountry.  It was bus number 142, and it's a very famous image. It's what people expect to see when they see the bus. But at some point, relatively recently, someone shot out the 142, really, really quite carefully.

Like, uh, this, it's not like they were just, you know, spraying bullets into the bus at random. They shot out the 142 specifically, whether this was what they intended or not, feels like some kind of commentary on Chris and his story.

Steph: We can maybe say that they were part of the haters group?

Eva: Yeah, feels like something a hater would do, right? And one of the things that was really important to Carine is that they put that back. So they replicated the 142 and from the outside it looks intact, but from the inside you can see the bullet holes. So the story is preserved, but people are also going to get their moment that they want with the bus.

Steph: The museum staff and all of the people that helped make decisions around the bus, like Carine, are trying to make the exhibit as immersive as possible, to ensure that in some ways it’s equivalent to people hiking the Stampede trail.

Eva: So, the bus won't fit inside the museum. So they're building an outdoor exhibit for the bus itself. There's going to be a shelter, you know, sort of an open sided roof over it to protect it from the elements. It's going to be in this nice forest grove right off the museum parking lot. And then inside the museum there'll be an exhibit as well that will have some of the objects that they can't display outdoors. For instance, Chris's chair that he took that photo in.

Steph: As part of the current Gallery of Alaska exhibit, Chris’s objects will be added to the History of Interior Alaska section. There will also be a digital component. The team photographed every inch of the entire bus for preservation. And that includes the graffiti, so people who have visited can see their signatures online.

Eva: which I think is very cool for someone to be able to go back and say, hey, that's what I wrote when I was 19 and traveled to the bus, 15 years ago, and here's what that trip meant to me.

Steph: The website will also include a detailed history and timeline of how the bus got there.

Eva: The bus has this funny history that somehow touches on almost like every major industry or major event in like modern Alaskan history.

As far as anyone knows, the bus came up the Alaska highway after World War II as a military vehicle and that's a big part of interior Alaska history in itself, the building of the highway, the opening up of the interior and you know, Fairbanks being a military town. And then at some point it was painted school bus yellow. Maybe it was a school bus on base. They don't really know. And then it became a city transit bus. And then it got involved in road construction for mining, because of statehood.

Steph: During the mid-20th century there was a mine at the end of the Stampede trail, but it was really rough to get out there.

Eva: When Alaska achieved statehood in 1959, they got a bunch of infrastructure money from the Feds. And so road improvements were a big part of that. And this crew got hired to turn Stampede Trail into Stampede Road.

Steph: During construction, the bus was hauled out into the Alaskan wild, and was used as living quarters for family members of the crew. There were originally 2 buses. One they cooked and ate in, and the other they slept in. The sleeping bus made it out safely, but Bus 142’s front wheel broke at the hub and so they left it behind. For decades it served as a shelter for miners and hunters, anyone who found it.

Eva: So one of the things they're looking at is sort of like, all these waves of new industry or new arrival, often extractive in nature as well. One of the things that I think that they're playing with in the exhibit is sort of like, what brings people to Alaska and what do they want to take away with them when they leave? Whether that's stuff they've mined out of the ground or a photo with the bus, or a good paycheck on a base for a couple years. You know, these are the things that define Alaska often is, is new arrivals, taking things. So they're trying to use the bus to sort of show this, this complicated relationship that Alaska has with its waves of arrivals.

Steph: Angela, the museum’s project lead, told Eva about the larger themes and ideas that she hopes the exhibit conveys. Like why people come to Alaska and the mythology surrounding people’s ideas about the state.

Angela: One of our themes is the role of literature and the mythology of Alaska as a wild place and what has it done?

Eva: Yes! Yes! I'm so excited about your exhibit!

Angela: How has it drawn people here, the millions of people who come here every year for tourism. The place, the landscape, and its separation, its wildness, is a huge part of why people ever wanted to come here. And what are these kind of culturally different concepts of wilderness? You know, are there indigenous perspectives that can be brought out that people have a totally different kind of feeling about wild places? We Euro Americans think about it as a place to remove ourselves from everything else. And for, you know, indigenous people, perhaps it's more a place where they can come together, you know, at fish camp or in hunting, you know, for gathering and foraging. So what do these wild places mean to different people is a big question.

Steph: Angela hopes the exhibit inspires visitors to explore their relationship and understanding of Alaska and the wild. The dates are not 100% confirmed, but the plan is for the outdoor exhibit to be open late 2025. But, some of the virtual components are already coming together.

Steph: I have to ask, this initial motive of taking the bus out so that less people would travel to it and less people get hurt, as far as we know has that worked?

Eva: Yeah, I haven't heard of any more rescues. I would not be at all surprised to learn that some people are still going to where the bus was. But probably a much smaller number. But, tons of people have been finding their way to the bus in Fairbanks, and that's a much safer proposition.

Steph: Early on, Eva described herself as being a skeptic of Chris’s story. It was only when she first read Carine’s book about their childhood that she started to empathize with him and started to understand some of his extreme choices.

The second time that happened, the second thing that won her over, was seeing the bus for the first time in her 16 years of reporting on it.

Eva: It was surprisingly emotional. I stepped into the high bay and it was this overwhelming feeling of familiarity.  Like, I know this bus, you know? I, I've, I've looked at it in pictures. I've seen the movie replica. I've read about it. I've thought about it. And I just, I felt like I knew every curve, you know?

And then, going inside, I was very moved by all the graffiti  it sort of felt like stepping into a church, in terms of like, I'm not religious, but when I go into a church or a temple, I, I can feel that it's a place that means a lot to a lot of people. You know, you can feel that when you're in one of those places. And stepping into the bus felt like, oh, this is, this is sacred ground for a lot of people, you know?

People were saying  stuff like, you know, I'm a, I'm a better man because of you, and like, traveling here changed my life, or, or reading about you inspired me to, you know, go in a direction where I'm so much happier now.

It's easy to roll your eyes um, but conforming to other people's expectations of us, or society's expectations of us, can really grind you down. You know, and, and um, having a story that pushes you to find your own path, and one that is, you know, the right one for you, maybe, uh, is really powerful stuff. So, I guess I'm not really a skeptic anymore.

Peter: Eva Holland is a contributing editor for ���ϳԹ���. Her article, “BUS 142 is Ready for its Close Up” is in the January/February issue of ���ϳԹ���.

Steph Brown is a freelance audio producer, based in Los Angeles.

This story was written and produced by Steph, with editing by me, Peter Frick-Wright. Music and sound design by Robbie Carver.

The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast is made possible by our ���ϳԹ��� Plus members. Learn more about all the benefits of membership at outsideonline.com/podplus.