Two years he walks the Earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white north. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.

While Krakauer and many readers have a largely sympathetic view of McCandless others particularly Alaskans have expressed negative views about McCandless and those who romanticize his fate. Additionally there were cabins stocked with emergency supplies within a few miles of the bus although they had been vandalized and all the supplies were spoiled. Sherry Simpson writing in the Anchorage Press described her trip to the bus with a friend and their reaction upon reading the comments that tourists had left lauding McCandless as an insightful Thoreau-like figure:

Among my friends and acquaintances the story of Christopher McCandless makes great after-dinner conversation.

A full-length article on McCandless also appeared in the February 8th 1993 issue of the The New Yorker magazine. That same year McCandless's story also became the subject of Ron Lamothe's documentary The Call of the Wild. In January 1993 Jon Krakauer publiChristopher McCandlessd McCandless' story in that month's issue of Outside magazine.