Photo: Alaska Department of Natural Resources

The Bus From ‘Into the Wild’ Has Found a New Home in Alaska

News Movies
by Eben Diskin Aug 6, 2020

The Into the Wild bus, made famous by the real-life and ill-fated wilderness adventures of Chris McCandless, will now call a museum in Fairbanks home.

The abandoned bus where Chris McCandless spent the last months of his life, as recounted in the 1996 novel Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and in a movie adaption of the same name in 2007, was located on the side of the Teklanika River in Alaska since the early 1960s. In June 2020, the bus was airlifted from the site to prevent fans from trying to hike to it — the trek to reach it was treacherous, requiring hikers to ford rivers, and several have died en route.

On Thursday, Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources announced that the bus will likely be housed at the University of Alaska’s Museum of the North in Fairbanks.

Corri Feige, commissioner of the Department of Natural Resources, said, “It can honor all of the lives and dreams, as well as the deaths and sorrows associated with the bus, and do so with respect and dignity.”

Bus 142 is a green and white 1940s-era International Harvester, which has been made iconic by Krakauer’s writing. Twenty-four-year-old Christopher McCandless took up residence in the abandoned bus for 114 days in his search for solitude, before dying alone at the site in 1992.

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