75 pages • 2 hours read
Jon KrakauerInto The Wild
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Virginia Beach”
Chris’s sister Carine McCandless wonders what would have happened if Chris had taken the family dog, Buck, along with him on his journey. Although Chris wouldn’t hesitate to put his own life in danger, he likely would have been more cautious if he had the dog with him. Carine looks a lot like Chris. She is the same height as him and also energetic. Otherwise the two siblings are very different. Carine now has a good relationship with her parents. She does not harbor the same animosity toward wealth that Chris did; she co-owns an auto-repair shop with her husband and hopes to be a millionaire.
Almost a year after Chris’s death, Carine is still mourning and cries almost every day. She learned of Chris’s death when her husband came home early from work and told her while she washed the dog. Carine grieved loudly, and then she and her husband drove to meet her parents.
Within the week Carine and her older brother Sam flew to Alaska to obtain Chris’s remains and possessions. Carine flew home with Chris’s ashes in a knapsack.
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Stikine Ice Cap”
Many believe Chris McCandless intended to die when he went into the Alaskan wilderness, but Krakauer suggests that his death was an accident. One reason he believes so has to do with his own experience as a mountain climber. In 1977 Krakauer wanted to be the first to climb the north wall of a mountain in Alaska named the Devils Thumb. He was 23, one year younger than McCandless when he entered the Alaskan wild. At the time Krakauer was working as a carpenter.
Krakauer hitched a ride on a workboat from Gig Harbor, Washington, to Petersburg, Alaska. While camping out at a library, he was approached by a young woman who offered him a place to stay at her home. The next day he was given a ride on a boat to the mainland, where the Devils Thumb awaited. He hiked and skied through the ice for two days until he reached the Stikine Ice Cap, a dangerous passage filled with crevasses. Krakauer nearly fell through more than once.
Once he made it across the ice cap, Krakauer waited for food and supplies to be dropped by airplane at a predetermined point by the base of the Devils Thumb. He set up base camp and waited for the plane, but it snowed for several days, making a drop-off impossible. Krakauer waited in his tent while food rations ran low. He could not contact anyone for help. Eventually a plane came, but Krakauer had trouble signaling his location to the pilot through the dense snowfall. After several passes, the pilot finally dropped off the food and supplies.
The next morning the weather cleared and Krakauer began climbing the Devils Thumb. He found a wall of ice that rose 300 feet and began to climb. At first the climbing went well and Krakauer entered a peaceful, trancelike state, but 700 feet up the ice grew thinner and Krakauer found himself stuck in a precarious position. He panicked and climbed back down until he reached solid ground. He was forced to conclude that the climb was over.
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Stikine Ice Cap”
After returning to base camp, Krakauer spent a few days in his tent deciding whether to try another ascent of the Devils Thumb. One afternoon he smoked some marijuana and started to cook oatmeal in his tent, which partially caught on fire. He was especially bothered because the tent was his father’s.
After three days he attempted to climb the Devils Thumb again, but he only made it 120 feet before turning around. He camped nearer the climbing route but another storm came on, and his sleeping bag was soon buried in snow. He attempted to traverse to his base camp in the blizzard but, after stepping into a crevasse, he opted to wait out the storm in the middle of the ice cap. When the weather cleared Krakauer saw that he wasn’t going to succeed in climbing the north side of the Devils Thumb. He decided instead to try an easier route on the south face. Another storm advanced on the horizon during the ascent, and Krakauer chose a quicker route. He encountered a precarious position similar to the one he’d faced in his first attempt. High up on the cliff, his pick-axe struck only rock. This time he successfully maneuvered beyond the impasse and made it to the summit of the Devils Thumb.
A week later he was picked up by a boat piloted by Jim Freeman. Freeman bought Krakauer dinner and let him stay in a van in his backyard in Petersburg. That night Krakauer went to a bar alone, where no one seemed to care that he had just climbed the Devils Thumb.
Krakauer admits that he might’ve been young and naïve, but he did not want to die on the Devils Thumb. McCandless, he suggests, felt the same way.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
One of the main theories Krakauer hopes to disprove in Into the Wild is that McCandless was suicidal. In Chapters 14 and 15 Krakauer delves deep into his own personal experience to illuminate how young people seek dangerous experiences without necessarily wanting to die. By walking the reader through his own solitary journey in the Alaskan wilderness, Krakauer shows that a person can be exhilarated by the challenge of risky climbs and adventures without wanting those adventures to end in tragedy. McCandless’s trial in Alaska was similar. While McCandless savored the challenge of living off of the land, he did not wish to succumb to starvation.
Chapter 15 begins with an epigraph from Donald Barthelme’s novel The Dead Father, which speaks to the complicated feelings a son might have toward his father:
“He is mad about being small when you were big, but not, that’s not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn’t notice” (145).
This passage highlights how a young man might feel diverse and conflicting emotions toward his father, and suggests that these emotions might be expressed in ways other than language. Krakauer goes on to describe his relationship with his own father, who wanted Krakauer to pursue a field like medicine. Instead, Krakauer spent much of his 20s climbing mountains. Nevertheless, Krakauer feels that he did take after his father, only in unexpected ways. He writes, “The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit” (150). That pursuit was climbing mountains.
Krakauer’s personal history is meant to shed light on McCandless’s turbulent relationship with his father and illustrate how that relationship fueled McCandless’s drive for solitude and nature. Such a device makes McCandless relatable and bolsters Krakauer’s claim that McCandless was not driven by insanity or suicidal ideation.
Related Titles
By Jon Krakauer
