Into the wild how does chris die

Another hunter uses his two-way radio to contact Alaska State Troopers so they can evacuate the body. The following morning, a police helicopter arrives and the body of Christopher McCandless is removed, along with his camera and film, the S. An autopsy on McCandless finds no broken bones or internal injuries. Because his remains weigh a mere 67 pounds, starvation is recorded as the cause of death. This chapter introduces one of the primary motifs of Into the Wild , that of documents.

Because the book's subject, Christopher McCandless, has died before author Jon Krakauer can meet him, Krakauer must rely on the testimony of the people McCandless encountered in order to stitch together the story of the young man's journey — and especially on the documents McCandless left behind. The first of these documents is McCandless's S. Laursen also identified other varieties of mushrooms in the photos that made people violently ill.

They about as toxic looking as any mushroom could look in my opinion, and it seems hard to believe Chris McCandless would have gorged on them, let alone eat one. Even if he had tried one, according to the research I found online, it would have made him violently ill — but not fatally so — and it is unlikely he would have tried anymore. Regardless, we will likely never know with any certainty what caused the death of Chris McCandless.

It will remain an unsolved mystery, his death a tragic end to a life full of promise. What I believe is that Chris McCandless did not intend his Alaskan trip to be a suicide mission, and that he planned to walk out of the bush and re-enter society sometime at end of How do we know this?

From his photos of course. After all, why document your travels, if not to share them with others. Like Like. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account.

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Like this: Like Loading A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Henry Blodget. Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know. Because the wild potato was universally believed to be safe to eat, in this article I speculated that McCandless had mistakenly consumed the seeds of the wild sweet pea, Hedysarum mackenzii —a plant thought to be toxic, and which is hard to distinguish from Hedysarum alpinum.

I attributed his death to this blunder. It seemed more plausible that McCandless had indeed eaten the roots and seeds of the purportedly nontoxic wild potato rather than the wild sweet pea. Thomas Clausen, a professor in the biochemistry department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, for analysis.

Shortly before my book was published, Clausen and one of his graduate students, Edward Treadwell, conducted a preliminary test that indicated the seeds contained an unidentified alkaloid. When Clausen and Treadwell completed their analysis of wild-potato seeds, though, they found no trace of swainsonine or any other alkaloids.

No alkaloids. I was perplexed. Clausen was an esteemed organic chemist, and the results of his analysis seemed irrefutable. His hunch derived from his knowledge of Vapniarca, a little-known Second World War concentration camp in what was then German-occupied Ukraine. In , as a macabre experiment, an officer at Vapniarca started feeding the Jewish inmates bread made from seeds of the grass pea, Lathyrus sativus , a common legume that has been known since the time of Hippocrates to be toxic.

Arthur Kessler, understood what this implied, particularly when within months, hundreds of the young male inmates of the camp began limping, and had begun to use sticks as crutches to propel themselves about. In some cases inmates had been rapidly reduced to crawling on their backsides to make their ways through the compound …. Once the inmates had ingested enough of the culprit plant, it was as if a silent fire had been lit within their bodies.

There was no turning back from this fire—once kindled, it would burn until the person who had eaten the grasspea would ultimately be crippled ….