American wanderer and traveler Christopher McCandless was born on February 12, 1968 in Southern California. He spent his first six years in El Segundo, a city in Los Angeles County, before his parents moved the family to Annandale, Virginia. His father worked for NASA and his mother was a secretary – and later a co-partner of sorts in her husband’s self-run consulting business.

Despite their financial success, however, the McCandless family was fraught with emotional turbulence. Husband and wife fought often, and these fights occasionally escalated into physical brawls. They often contemplated divorce.

McCandless himself was noted from a young age as being surprisingly strong willed, with a compulsion to be idealistic and physically powerful. He served as the captain of his high school cross-country running team, serving as a source of inspiration for his teammates and entreating them to think of running as a spiritual exercise in which they were running against all the evils of the world.

McCandless graduated from high school in 1986 and then from university in Atlanta in 1990, having majored in anthropology and history. Despite his success and status as an upper-middle class citizen, however, McCandless had a growing contempt for material America, and he found himself being influenced by philosophers the likes of Leo Tolstoy and Jack London. He considered leaving society to enter a period of quiet contemplation.

After graduating he began to travel, donating much of the money his family had given him. He wandered under the name ‘Alexander Supertramp’ through Arizona, California and North Dakota, alternating between holding down jobs and living entirely on his own without human contact. He even allowed his car to be washed away in a flash flood and took great pride in his ability to travel with a minimum of money, gear and food.

All this paled in comparison to his ultimate dream, however, of an ‘Alskan Odyssey’ wherein he would live in a desolate locale, far from humanity, and progress further physically and spiritually. And in 1992 he did so, hitchhiking to Fairbanks, Alaska. He was last seen alive by James Gallien, who gave McCandless a ride to the beginning of the Stampede Trail and constantly tried to dissuade the young man from embarking on the journey with a minimum of supplies.

After hiking for some time through the snow McCandless located an old bus used as a shelter for hunters in the area. He used it in his beginning to live off the land, and at first had some success poaching and hunting. However his fortunes began to fail as food became more and more scarce, and soon enough he found himself essentially trapped within the vicinity of the bus with no food and no way out.

McCandless was found a few weeks later, dead in his sleeping bag. His journal indicates that he’d managed to remain in the area for at least 189 days. He is thought to have died from a combination of starvation and a poisonous fungus found on some seeds he ate, though the latter is a matter of speculation.