The ‘Into the Wild’ Bus Was a Pilgrimage Site in the Wilderness. Can It Hold Up in a Museum?

Published February 7, 2024 03:00AM

On June 18, 2020, Carine McCandless got a call from Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources. Corri Feige, the commissioner at the time, wanted to give her a heads-up: the abandoned bus where Carine’s brother, Chris, had briefly lived and then died was at that moment dangling in midair below a Chinook helicopter, on its way to a flatbed trailer and then to storage in a government facility. The bus made famous by Into the Wild was finally being hauled out.

Carine didn’t have a clue that this might be coming, but she wasn’t entirely surprised. The bus, which sat roughly 20 miles down a rough 4×4 trail from the nearest highway, had been a source of concern to Alaskan authorities for years. Too many visitors, inspired by her brother’s story, had gotten into trouble while attempting to visit the site; too many formal and informal rescues had been necessary. In the previous decade, in separate incidents, two young women died on their treks. Both drowned while attempting to cross the cold, fast-moving Teklanika—the same river that had barred Chris, who was 24 when he died, from retreating to the highway as his food supply ran out.

In the eerily quiet early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed that someone in the local government had decided that now was the time to remove the temptation of the bus for good.

Carine understood why she hadn’t been given more warning. “The commissioner didn’t know me,” she says. “She didn’t know if I was going to contact a bunch of people and tell them to go surround the bus and sing ‘Kumbaya.’ ” Carine wouldn’t have done that, but she didn’t blame the state for holding its cards close.

The commissioner let her know that the department intended to wait a few days to announce the removal so the family could digest it privately. But even in the relative emptiness of rural Alaska news travels fast, and a famous bus in flight is hard to miss. As the two women talked, Carine’s phone began to ping. And ping. Text messages and social media notifications poured in—an experience shared by other people with a connection to the story. (A short while later, Eddie Vedder, the Pearl Jam front man who created the haunting soundtrack for the 2007 movie version of Into the Wild, told Carine: “My phone hasn’t blown up this fast since the Cubbies won the World Series!”) Even before Carine checked any of those messages, she had a feeling that the news was out.

Sure enough, a resident of the Healy area, Melanie Hall, had gone for a walk on Stampede Road—the paved portion of the historic overland trail that leads to where the bus sat for 60 years—when she spotted a helicopter with an enormous load. That looks like a bus, she thought as it flew closer, and moments later she knew: it was the bus. By the time Hall made it to a nearby gravel pit where the Chinook set the large vehicle down, another neighbor had arrived, and so had the borough mayor. As the bus was loaded onto a long trailer, Hall snapped photos she later posted on Facebook. A friend reposted them, and from there the pictures were shared and shared. The images went viral, and the state government began fielding media inquiries about the removal.

The Department of Natural Resources didn’t have much to say at first, except that the bus was being moved to an undisclosed location, its long-term fate also under wraps. Feige, the commissioner who’d contacted Carine, issued a statement. “We encourage people to enjoy Alaska’s wild areas safely, and we understand the hold this bus has had on the popular imagination,” it said. “However, this is an abandoned and deteriorating vehicle that was requiring dangerous and costly rescue efforts, but more importantly, was costing some visitors their lives. I’m glad we found a safe, respectful and economical solution to this situation.”

That night as I packed for a canoe trip, I scrambled to put together a news item for Outside Online. “There’s something strange and bittersweet about knowing the story is over now,” I wrote.

But I was wrong. A new chapter in the long, layered story of Bus 142 had just begun.

The origins of the bus are murky. It was built by International Harvester, a now defunct American company that thrived in the first half of the 20th century, challenging the likes of Ford and John Deere for market dominance. Primarily a tractor maker, the firm got into military procurement during the Second World War, and alongside a slate of armored personnel carriers, cargo trucks, and other military vehicles, it began turning out passenger buses.

Vehicle identification numbers weren’t introduced until the mid-1950s, and if there ever was a serial number somewhere on this particular vehicle, it has long since been lost to rust. But we know that its tires, mounted on split rims, were military-issue, dating from 1947. We also know that its original paint was military gray-green. It most likely entered Alaskan territory, in the aftermath of the war, via the Alaska Highway. It might have served as transportation on a base for a period of time. At some point it acquired a new coat of paint, the bright yellow-orange of a school bus. Sometime after that it was repainted yet again, in the white and green familiar to those of us who have followed the saga, and put to work as a city bus in fast-growing Fairbanks.

Alaska’s ascension to statehood in 1959 brought an influx of money to build and improve its roads. Around that time, the bus was damaged and retired from public service, and from there its story is easier to plot. The engine was pulled, and a massive tow hitch was welded to the nose. Sometime between 1959 and 1960, Jess Mariner, a member of a road construction crew, bought the remaining shell, along with another old bus, to use as housing for his wife and children while he worked on a project funded by the new government money: upgrading the Stampede Trail, a rough overland route near Denali, to facilitate access to the antimony mine at its terminus. Hauled behind heavy equipment, the bus offered warm shelter for the Mariners as the crew worked its way deep into the Alaskan bush. But when a front wheel snapped off its axle, most likely in early 1961, the family moved on and the bus was abandoned.

Soon it had a new function. The Stampede Trail lies within a long, horizontal rectangle of state land that juts into the northeastern corner of Denali National Park. With protected acreage on three sides, it’s a popular corridor for moose hunters. The Mariners’ erstwhile mobile home became an informal public-use cabin, a shelter for people as they moved through the area each fall. Locals added mattresses to the bare-metal bed frames, and at some point the Mariners’ vertical, barrel-style woodstove was replaced by a horizontal one. Nearly three decades passed, and then everything changed.

In the waning days of 1992, the January 1993 issue of Outside began arriving in mailboxes and on newsstands across America and around the world. It included a long feature story by Jon Krakauer, “Death of an Innocent,” which introduced readers to a young, adventurous drifter from the northern Virginia suburbs, Christopher J. McCandless, who had disappeared from his home and traveled across the continent under the alias Alexander Supertramp. After many months on the road, he made it to Alaska during the still-frozen spring of 1992 and hitchhiked to the outskirts of Denali. From there he walked into the bush, intending to live off the land, and made a home for himself in an abandoned bus. He died there in mid-August, and his body was found by moose hunters in early September.

The story created a sensation. Krakauer wrote later that it “generated more mail than any other article” in Outside’s history. By 1996, he had fleshed out McCandless’s life and death in a book—the famous bestseller Into the Wild. Eleven years after that it was revisited again, as a beautiful feature film.

The pilgrimages began not long after McCandless’s story became public, and they increased dramatically when the movie came out. Visitor numbers went from dozens to hundreds; the arrival of social media likely helped drive hikers to the bus as well. Readers and viewers had always been divided about the story—many admired McCandless or recognized their own adventurous yearnings in him; others criticized, sometimes very harshly, what they considered his inexperience and lack of humility about the demands of Alaska’s backcountry. Add in summer after summer of expensive rescues and the two deaths—the first in 2010, the second in 2019—and by the time the bus was flown out in June 2020, it was easily the most polarizing vehicle in Alaskan history.

Pat Druckenmiller found out about the bus’s removal on the same day Carine McCandless got her phone call. “It was on the local news immediately,” says Druckenmiller, director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North (UAMN). The museum, a distinctive building at the heart of the Fairbanks campus, sits on a hilltop with a view of Denali and the wide curtain of the Alaska Range. “I know I was not the only person in this building who, when we saw pictures that day in the media or heard about it on the radio, had the same thought,” he says. “Gosh, what are they going to do with the bus?”

Within a day or two Druckenmiller, along with several colleagues who included senior collections manager Angela Linn, had decided to put the Museum of the North forward as a permanent home for the vehicle. Though it’s located on a university campus, the UAMN is a broadly focused museum; its mandate is to draw from art, archaeology, natural science, and other areas to tell stories about the interior of Alaska and the wider circumpolar world. The curators were among several parties interested in the bus; another Fairbanks-based institution, the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum, also put its name in, and some private parties outside the state did, too.

At the UAMN, interest went well beyond the McCandless story. “It’s fascinating on its own,” says Druckenmiller. “Because it’s such a touchstone for so many different things, it has the power to tell stories about Alaska, about its people, about its culture and natural history, that are all tied to it in many different ways.” Plus it had a following—a level of celebrity unmatched by anything in the museum’s collection. “So for me it was like, this is a really powerful object.”

With connections to statehood, the military, the postwar boom, mining, road construction, hunting, and outdoor adventure, Bus 142’s story touches on nearly every big moment in modern Alaskan history. In a curator’s hands, it’s the kind of thing that can be used to speak to a lot of different people about a lot of different things. But bringing the bus to the UAMN would be fraught, because it remained controversial. Detractors wouldn’t like it getting a new round of attention, and fans still resented that it was removed from the wild.

A few weeks after the bus was removed, the museum team learned that the UAMN had been selected to take custody of it. Now the challenge was to build an exhibit that proved the object’s worth to as many people as possible.

Creating a large permanent museum exhibit is both a tangible physical process and an intellectual one. The museum staff knew that they would have to put together an advisory team to help think through ways to position the bus and its role in Alaska’s history. Linn recalls them asking, “Who were the people that were going to be part of that team, in order to capture this huge range of perspectives?”

Carine was one of the first names on the list. She was young when Chris died—just 21—and at first her parents spoke for the family. But in the years since, she has become an important point of contact for her brother’s admirers, and received thousands of emails and letters about what he meant to people. She became a more prominent figure after her bestselling book, The Wild Truth, was published in 2014. These days she often speaks in schools and colleges, where her book and Krakauer’s are sometimes assigned side by side.

Carine, who is now 52, still lives in Virginia, where she works as a writer and editor. She knew, as soon as she heard about the removal, that she would likely need to serve as a bridge between authorities in Alaska and the Into the Wild community. With her friend Erik Halfacre, a former Alaskan hiker and guide who for years promoted safer travel to the bus, she formed a nonprofit, Friends of Bus 142. “That was the next step,” Halfacre says. “What are we going to do to try to get this thing a long-term home?”

Once the state confirmed that the bus was headed to Fairbanks, both Carine and Halfacre joined the advisory council. So did Mickey Mariner Hines, who lived in the bus as a young child after her father bought it. (Jess Mariner also shot footage of the bus at the time, a valuable resource for museum staff and now part of the collection.) They were joined by a couple of local journalists who’d written about the bus, a few historians, a biologist from Denali National Park, citizens of nearby Athabascan tribes, several museum staff, and others. For the first six months, this large group gathered on Zoom to brainstorm themes and narratives.

The bus had to be free for anyone to see—that was a requirement built into the agreement with the state. And there were other guardrails dictated by the scope of the project. “From an exhibit standpoint, the collection calls the shots,” says Roger Topp, the museum’s director of exhibits. Due to its size, the bus would have to be displayed outside. A shelter would need to be built, to protect it against the worst of Alaska’s weather, and repairs performed to keep the interior sealed and dry.

In the end, the group settled on three main components. The first is the outdoor display: the bus itself, placed in an open-sided shelter in a pocket of boreal forest behind the museum parking lot, accompanied by interpretive panels at the site and along the trail leading to it. Anyone will be able to visit, observe, and even touch the bus’s exterior; access to the interior will be limited to guided tours only.

The second exhibit is a much smaller display inside one of the main museum galleries, highlighting objects from and related to the bus that are too fragile to be left in situ. The national guardsmen who removed the vehicle from the Stampede Trail were careful to preserve the items left inside and scattered around it over the years. These arrived at the museum in two large crates that have since been cataloged and stored. They form a curious mixture: tributes to Chris and his story—a half-burned dollar bill, a dream catcher, Tibetan prayer flags—alongside plausibly useful items left behind for some hiker who might need them, including a crank-powered flashlight, a plastic trowel, and fire-starter blocks. Also in the collection are a folding camp chair believed to be the one Chris sat in for his self-portrait and the mattress on which he died. (The chair will be part of the indoor display; the mattress, says Linn, will be stored by the museum out of sight of the public.)

The third piece is digital, and while the indoor and outdoor exhibits won’t be open until 2025, some virtual components are already coming together. Museum staffer Della Hall, project manager for the conservation phase, spent several days combing every surface of the bus for graffiti, taking digital photos of each carving or tag. The 700-odd photos have been compiled into an album online, with visitors encouraged to claim their tag and tell the story of their visit to the Stampede Trail.

The album caters specifically to a community already heavily invested in the bus. But the exhibit will range much more widely, examining successive waves of incursion and extraction that have defined Alaska since its colonization. It will explore the roles of mining and road construction in the creation of the state’s modern interior. It will touch on its more than 1,500 missing persons, a disproportionate number of whom are Indigenous, and ask an uncomfortable question: Why does the world care so much about one young man and tend to ignore so many others? And it will consider the role of literature, of books like Into the Wild, in shaping cultural ideas about Alaska.

The plan is to use the bus as a prism, each facet shedding light on another aspect of a much larger story.

On a sunny afternoon last July, I visited the high bay, the enormous engineering lab at the University of Alaska Fairbanks where conservation work on the bus was completed. I had driven into Fairbanks that morning from the Alaska-Yukon border town of Tok, braking for moose and dodging potholes. I made it up the hill to campus and met Angela Linn in the museum lobby, and then we hopped in her car and drove over to the high bay. After years of reading, thinking, and writing about the bus—after looking at photos and watching the movie—I would finally see it for myself.

Linn used a swipe card to unlock the access door, and I paused just inside the threshold, unprepared for how incredibly familiar the object itself seemed. I knew this bus. I knew its rusting, green and white paint job, mottled with yellow patches from the older coat of paint showing through. I knew its rounded roof and bulbous fenders. I knew its blunt black letters: FAIRBANKS CITY TRANSIT SYSTEM.

The bus looked exactly how I expected it to look. And the museum would like it to stay that way. In October 2022, Linn’s team received a $500,000 grant from the federally funded Save America’s Treasures program to perform the work needed on the bus. That allowed them to hire an expert group of conservators from Pennsylvania-based B. R. Howard and Associates.

In museum terminology, to restore an object means to turn back the clock, to make changes with the aim of returning it to a previous state. Had this been the goal, they could have used the information available to them—photos, footage, recollections of people who’d visited the site over the years—to make the bus appear as Chris found it in 1992. Or they could have spun the dial back even further, to the version abandoned on the trail at the start of the 1960s. Instead, the work they did is known as conservation—keeping the bus the way it is now, locked in time.

We circled the vehicle and Linn talked me through some of the work that had been done over the past six months or so. “Let me see, the windows were almost entirely shot out or broken,” she began. The conservators removed the original metal window frames to have them fitted with new glass, and a local company donated the panes, along with the labor to reassemble everything. Technically, that was restoration and not conservation, but also a necessary step to keep the weather at bay.

The paint, exposed to decades of Alaskan winters, was flaking off inside and out. In some areas of the exterior the problem was easy to manage, but inside the bus, where every surface was covered with messages left by visitors, preserving the graffiti meant attending to each individual flake.

“It was kind of like cornflakes, if you can imagine,” says Brian Howard, the head conservator and cofounder of B. R. Howard. “It was very brittle and had lifted and cupped, but still loosely adhered to the metal substrate.” The team applied a liquid consolidant to hold the paint in place, then ironed the flakes into a smooth layer. In some places, that meant using a syringe and going flake by flake. Howard recalls spending two days on a single square foot.

Rust was a big concern. Any exposed patches had to be brushed smooth, removing the surface oxidation before a layer of acrylic resin could be applied. And we aren’t talking about a few bits: there was rust in the interior of the bus, inside and outside the barrel stove, on the hood, and across the entire undercarriage. Compared with the graffiti preservation, Howard says, “removing corrosion underneath the bus was not delicate work, but it had to be very thorough.” The underside was coated with layers of mud dating back to the 1950s, and all that caked-on earth held moisture. Howard’s team spent ten days lying on their backs, clearing away dirt and rust with wire brushes before rolling the resin on.

From January to April of 2023, working in teams that rotated in and out of Alaska from Pennsylvania, the conservators stabilized the bus. They scraped away mosses and lichens from its gutters; pulled up ancient layers of rotting carpet, linoleum, and plywood on the floor (preserving a sample of each, then installing a new plywood and linoleum floor), and documenting everything as they went.

The process required dozens of individual decisions, each influencing how the public would experience Bus 142. Most glaring were the four gaping holes that had been cut into the roof and the floor to allow the bus to be hauled out by helicopter. The holes had to go: the bus needed to be watertight before it could be displayed outdoors. So the cut metal panels were fastened back in place, and the paint job on and around them restored—with one exception. The museum team decided to leave the lines where the panels were cut visible. Like scars left by surgery, they were a reminder: the flight out was part of the bus’s story now, too.

Then there was the 142 that appeared in black numerals near the top of the bus on the driver’s side. It’s visible in the camp chair photo, and often appears in images taken by visitors to the site. But by the time the bus was helicoptered off the Stampede Trail, the number had been carefully, thoroughly shot to hell.

At the Friends of Bus 142 website, nearly three decades of photographs have been crowdsourced and organized in chronological order. For the conservators and museum staff, they proved to be an invaluable resource—a month-by-month record of decay that allowed them to pinpoint the timing of the sabotage by gunfire. “If you look at the photos,” says Linn, “you can see exactly when it happened.”

The obliteration of the 142, along with the local hostility those bullet holes represented, were part of the bus’s history. But to Carine, preserving the effacement risked emphasizing negativity. “You have people who wanted to hike to the bus from all corners of this planet,” she says. “Now it’s going to be even easier to see. You’re going to have people come to the museum, and they’re going to be emotional, and they’re going to want to take their picture in front of it. If you take that away from them, you’re going to minimize the satisfaction of your audience.”

“You’re not dishonoring the truth by putting the 142 back,” she says. “The truth is this whole story and what it means to people.”

The team settled on a compromise. A new piece of metal, painted with a new 142, was affixed to the damaged exterior and made to look seamless. But from the inside you can still see the holes, along with each twisted curl of metal blown inward by the shot. You can reach out, as I did, and feel the jagged edges.

I first read Into the Wild not long before the movie came out. At the time, I was around the same age Chris was when he died. It was early in my writing career, and I worked for a website blogging about travel news and trends. That’s how I learned about the dilemma of the bus, the hikers who sought it out and the rescues they sometimes required. Two years later, at 27, I set out on my own big, wild adventure. I bought an aging Jeep and drove west across Canada to the Yukon, where I now live.

I often dreamed about hiking and camping; I dreamed of writing for Outside someday. I was, you could say, in the prime McCandless-admiring demographic. But I never found myself relating to Chris the way so many others had. I wasn’t infuriated by his choices, and I felt sadness and empathy for how his story ended. But I’d always had trouble wrapping my head around the kind of isolation he sought, and I hadn’t understood his decision to cut off all contact with his family.

That changed when Carine published The Wild Truth. She described a harrowingly abusive childhood. She wrote about how their parents’ home had been a facade, an apparently perfect suburban existence that obscured the violence and unhappiness within. She wrote that the happiest times she and Chris had, their reprieves, were in wild places. Suddenly, the pieces of Chris’s story that never made much sense to me—the fierceness of his disdain for conformity, his drive to push deeper and deeper into wilderness adventure, his willingness to disappear into a new life—clicked. It all made sense to me then.

On that summer afternoon in Fairbanks, when Linn pushed open the folding door of the bus and let me climb inside, I had a similar experience: a moment when something that once puzzled or eluded me snapped into focus. The bus was dim, and smaller than the city transports I’m accustomed to, but the space was powerful. A decade earlier, I interviewed a man who’d made several treks down the Stampede Trail, and he told me then that he believed the bus had a kind of spiritual magic to it, a mystical ability to confer peace on its visitors. He attributed that power to Chris himself—in a residual way, rather than a haunting—and at the time, hearing that, I probably stifled a groan. But now I wondered: If enough people imbue an object with their own potent beliefs, can it send that power back out, even to a nonbeliever like me?

I felt like I had stepped into a quiet corner of a temple or church. Only instead of being awed into silence by soaring stone arches or ancient mosaics or the dappled light of stained glass, I was staring at messages left by hundreds of visitors over the years, the notes that B. R. Howard had preserved and Della Hall had cataloged and photographed so meticulously.

“I don’t want a never ending life but to be alive while I’m here,” read one, carved into the paint.

There were messages in other languages. (“Chris, Merci de m’avoir ouvert les yeux.”) There were snippets of poems and quotations from literature. (Tolstoy’s famous line “I want movement, not a calm course of existence,” and a verse from Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”) In one corner, there were messages left by Carine during her own trips to the bus.

The sheer volume of scribbles, and the earnestness of what they expressed, were overwhelming. I was deeply, unexpectedly moved. If reading Carine’s book had helped me understand Chris, seeing the bus for myself helped me understand the people who’d followed him down the Stampede Trail.

Maybe that’s the magic of Bus 142 finding its way to the Museum of the North: It’s a chance for everyone who sees the exhibit to expand their understanding of a complex, multilayered story. For those who come looking for something more personal (a picture of the bus maybe, or a connection with Chris), to learn about the long history of outsiders who ventured north with extraction of one kind or another in mind. And for those who found themselves raising an eyebrow or rolling their eyes at Chris’s memory, to gain an appreciation for the impact he’s had on countless people the world over.

The ‘Into the Wild’ Bus Was a Pilgrimage Site in the Wilderness. Can It Hold Up in a Museum?

Carine McCandless knew, as soon as she heard about the removal of Bus 142 from the wilderness, that she would likely need to serve as a bridge between authorities in Alaska and the Into the Wild community.

“Because [the bus] is such a touchstone for so many different things,” says Pat Druckenmiller, director of UAMN, “it has the power to tell stories about Alaska, about its people, about its culture and natural history, that are all tied to it in many different ways.”

I felt like I had stepped into a quiet corner of a temple or church. Only instead of being awed into silence by soaring stone arches or ancient mosaics or the dappled light of stained glass, I was staring at messages left by hundreds of visitors over the years.