I've never read Into the Wild. Well, not the book, anyway. I read the article. Two things struck me:

1) Krakauer never met McCandless, and never interacted with anyone enough to know McCandless.

2) Krakauer's shtick was to tell the world exactly who McCandless was.

For most of 16 weeks McCandless more than held his own. Indeed, were it not for one or two

innocent and seemingly insignificant blunders he would have walked out of the Alaskan woods in

July or August as anonymously as he walked into them in April. Instead, the name of Chris

McCandless has become the stuff of tabloid headlines, and his bewildered family is left clutching the shards of a fierce and painful love.

I've known guys like Christopher McCandless. They're goofs. They fuck around until they decide shit's gotten a little too real and then they peel it back. Christopher McCandless hung it out past the point where he could reconsider and he's dead now. That's it. That's the only difference. McCandless eschewed the safety net and it took him four months to starve.

That Krakauer has been obsessed with this failure and ways to make it not Chris McCandless' fault says a lot: Krakauer really wants this to be the cruel fate of the universe conspiring to take down a seasoned outdoorsman, not a goofy 24-year-old kid who didn't have the sense to bring a map. Then shit got fuckin' meta when Outside published a lengthy article about people who risk their lives paying homage to Chris McCandless.

The troopers told me that 75 percent of all of the rescues they perform in the area happen on the Stampede Trail. “Obviously, there’s something that draws these people out here,” one of the troopers, who asked not to be named, told me. “It’s some kind of internal thing within them that makes them go out to that bus. I don’t know what it is. I don’t understand. What would possess a person to follow in the tracks of someone who died because he was unprepared?”

I can't hate Christopher McCandless. He was a dumb kid who didn't get a chance to learn from his mistakes, who read too much Tolstoy and not enough Jack London. Krakauer? Krakauer is a hagiographer.