Her father Walt McCandless is a renowned rocket scientist who had worked for NASA, and her mother Billie McCandless built a consulting business with him.īut family life for Chris was much more complicated than it appeared to be. He succeeded at everything he tried."Ĭarine said she has fond memories of family vacations and time spent outdoors with her family. The whole truth, she said, doesn't begin at the bus in Alaska, but rather at their childhood home 3,000 miles away in El Segundo, California. "He wanted to really separate himself from a situation he felt was very toxic," Carine told ABC News. In a new memoir, "The Wild Truth," Carine writes that she believes her brother's sudden disappearance and journey reflected his determination to separate himself from their parents and a traumatic childhood that she says they both shared. and I really felt and learned that I was doing a disservice to Chris and all those people 'cause the greatest inspiration comes from truth."
"I really watered down those answers for a long time. why Chris left the way he did and why he felt the need to push himself to such extremes," Carine told ABC News. "Frankly I was asked every time I met with a group of people. They are sharing what they say is a vital part of their brother's story, one that better explains why he had gone to such great lengths to vanish from their view on his epic excursion. McCandless' sister, Carine McCandless, and his half-sisters, Shelly and Shawna, say there is something else that many people don't know. But today, every spring, hikers from around the world still make the two-day trek to the bus, which has become a shrine to the young man many idolize as a symbol of adventure and a turning away from material things. He was there without a map and proper survival gear, and he had gone to great lengths to make it impossible for anyone to find him. McCandless has been criticized for being selfish and unprepared for his trip. His corpse weighed just 67 pounds.Īccording to his journal, for 114 days, Chris lived in what he called his "magic bus." By the end, he had written that "death looms" and he was "too weak to walk out." He wrote that he had "literally become trapped in the wild." Just over four months after he reached Alaska, McCandless' body was found by hunters in an abandoned bus he had found 30 miles away from the nearest town. The book detailed how after graduation McCandless suddenly disappeared, not telling his family where he was going, giving his savings to a charity, using the name "Alexander Supertramp," and then hitchhiking across deserts and the Great Plains, riding the rails and living in a trailer park on the rugged California coast before finally making his way to Alaska. His journey was immortalized in the book, which is still on school curriculums across the country, and later turned into an award-winning movie.
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