He was a 9 hour hike from the nearest town; Healy, AK.
For someone who died of starvation, this seems stupid to me, especially since the movie led you to believe he was nowhere near a damned soul.
uh, yeah, movies are for entertainment purposes not to teach you facts. If you ever want the real story you have to read books/newspapers/magazines/interviews.
shareThe movie and book aren't the most reliable or objective sources.
I'm especially used to that with movies, I suppose also so with books but I do expect books to be more truthful than movies.
Krakauer got so caught up with his romanticism of McCandles. A biochemist proves his theory wrong, so he tries to come up with another theory.
For someone who died of starvation, this seems stupid to me, especially since the movie led you to believe he was nowhere near a damned soul.
Uh, he got trapped in by melt and then became sick from poisonous berries, which made him too weak to make the trek out.
Right, I understand the "true" story (or best theories) is slightly different from the movie. The OP didn't specify as to which he was referring too, but he seemed to take issue with the story within the movie as he felt compelled to look up distance.
A day's hike for someone in good health would be near impossible for someone who's suffered an immobilizing injury, or so malnourished from starvation their body has started shutting down motor functions. Maybe he suffered an immobilizing injury where he laid for days trying to recover, and was already weak and severely malnourished before injury, which was basically the nail in the coffin (or bus).
Whatever the real cause of his death, it ultimately can be chalked up to inexperience.
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When logic and science aren't on your side, you always lose.
Whatever the real cause of his death, it ultimately can be chalked up to inexperience.
Two good posts,
It's nice to read what actually happened...
That's a very good point about him becoming too comfortable in the bus to realize the severity of his situation until it was too late to save himself.
My biggest question about the whole thing is whether or not he actually did see, in real life, a commercial airliner fly overhead the first day he found the bus, or was that just Hollywood trying to add an air of authenticity to the story?
If it was a detail fabricated by the movie creators then they failed their goal miserably since that specific detail actually produces whatever is the opposite of an authentic touch. If it was true and there actually was a plane then it means this man was a might bit more stupid than portrayed.
For those who might not have figured out already what difference a plane, or no plane even makes... I'll explain:
If a commercial airliner is seen flying over a given geographical location then, unless it was both hijacked and taken off-route by a pilot being forced to do so under threat of gunpoint (an extremely rare occurrence,) then it will most likely do so again. One sighting would indicate there exists a regulatory, planned, flight route over said location; In which case, all he had to do was take a hub-cap or other piece of unpainted metal off the bus and shine it up a bit. Then just lay there waiting for the next plane to fly into range, at which point he could easily have caught the attention of someone on board with the glint of the sun and some swivels of the wrist.
The more it became apparent that he was actually going to die out there (I had assumed that, since there was even a known story to tell about his experiences, that he must have made it back alive, and that the movie was still going to end well; But then I realized that he did keep a fairly detailed log and that his whole life's story might have been entirely told, and found out about, from a ledger found nearby his dead body.) So, as I was saying, the more it became clear that he wasn't going to beat the odds, the more that tiny little bit of info about a plane having been spotted on day 1 of his magic bus inhabitance, well that just kept nagging at my brain more and more as either a glaringly obvious hole in the story which was obviously added without the slightest bit of forethought, or a glaringly obvious indicator that this man was a complete idiot and in no way a seasoned outdoors man. He had no business being out there but his enormous and incredulous ego drove his baseless belief that he could manage just fine out there in conditions that have been KNOWN by the world at large for millenia to be too severe for humans to be able weather.
So if anyone happens to know whether that scene was just a bit of fiction thrown in by the movie industry, or if we know that really he did see that plane because he wrote it in his logbook that he did, I'd really like to know which it was so that I can quit thinking about this movie altogether and just move on.
Yeah, good post argument, he could've just like flagged down an airliner w. a shiny hubcap...?
shareHa ha!!!!
shareHa ha is right. Like an airliner at 20 000 feet (more or less) is going to notice a flash from a mirror in the woods! The guys who were standed in the Andes after the 1973 crash of the Uruguayan plane spotted the search planes and waved and flashed frantically many times, but they were invisible to the pilots until the plane reached below 1000 feet --something possible only for a helicopter in such an area (true also in the Alaskan wilds). They were only found when two of their number hiked out -- a grueling trek through mountains and valleys with no climbing equipment or boots, and one guided a rescue helicopter back to the crashed plane.
See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106246/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Emergency flares might have been useful, but his location would need to be known before any search would be sent out.
Signal mirrors have an effect range of 20 miles surface-to-air, they are only ineffective (1-3 miles) surface-to-surface due to the curvature of the Earth. 20,000 feet is less than 4 miles.
shareSignal mirrors have an effect range of 20 miles surface-to-air,
i was just watching the movie and read his life online. it seems rather stupid than romantic about his final days in Alaska.
shareHe died of starvation brought on by poison, it's likely very difficult to hike for 9hrs if your body is wracked by fever, pain and cold sweating. Hell, it's likely hard to even stand up when you feel that bad.
Also that 9hr hike included crossing several rivers that were now flooded by snow-melt...
Did you even watch this movie FFS? Because you don't seem to have followed the most obvious of scenes. Why must so many utter cretins need to be spoon-fed details that are as clear as a nun's urine? You have a brain, use it occasionally because your life may depend on having to operate a telephone at some point and those things can be tricky.
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. -Isaac Asimov
Alaskan officials said in the trivia notes he could've walked out if he had a decent map. This is all his fault
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Project Mayhem ID: In life I am ur432978. In death, I have a name. My name is AfroGeek.
Alaskan officials said in the trivia notes he could've walked out if he had a decent map.
"Did you even watch the movie FFS?"
Therein lies your problem. The movie doesn't get the facts right. The poisonous sweet pea theory has been discredited as has the moldy potato theory. But if you haven't read anything and just take the movies version, then you wouldn't know. You also wouldn't know that there was a vehicle bridge less than a mile from the bus that he could have crossed when he discovered the river was running high. You wouldn't know that there were three cabins within an hours hike stocked with emergency supplies, that it is widely suspected that he trashed. You wouldn't know that maggots take over a day to form on freshly killed game and he could have easily prepared enough meat from the moose to last months in that 24 hours.
There are lots of facts that were glossed over or ignored to make him a much more sympathetic anti-hero. But the reality is he was naive and grossly under prepared to go out and come back alive as he planned.
The other thing that kept bugging me was that his home life and childhood weren't even really that bad. Way more people have suffered through far worse conditions during childhood than merely being subjected to parents who fight, or who are overly concerned with having a good image in the view of their neighbors, oh and who just happen to be rich enough to want to buy their kid a new car to celebrate his graduating college. How insulting! So typical, is he, of the pretentiousness and utter ignorance of so many born into privilege.
"Oh what a plight and a burden having so much money, and a good education, and people who love you is! Waa waa! I'm going have my temper tantrum in defiance of my perfectly average parents who have never actually hurt me or my sister, not even once, in our entire lives. I'm going to go out into the middle of nowhere, where no one can possibly find me, where I'm sure to die from the elements, thereby breaking the hearts, not just of my family, but of so many amazing and wonderful people that have graced my life, all of whom have grown to love and care very deeply for me, along the way... Yeah, I'll really show all them!"
Now I finally understand what people mean when they say that suicide is selfish.
You are seriously going to say that his childhood was not that bad.... that is what his living parents want the world to believe. His full blood sister would say different.
How would you like to have to watch your father beat your mother? Anytime his parents would fight he was forced to watch and be a part of it. This was always true. His parents to the day he escaped them kept him involved in their personal troubles and they were overbearing and controlling of him.
He left them for good reason. Chris is dead and can not defend himself but anyone who was abused as a child can speak to how bad it is.
I do not think anyone has the right to say oh that was not that bad when they did not have to live through it. Imagine being 1-9 and beyond watching your father hit your mother yeah that is not bad at all. His sister will confirm this is true. There is lots of evidence such as police reports to show this is fact.