HarperElement
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in the US by HarperOne 2014
This UK edition published by HarperElement 2014
© Carine McCandless 2014
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
All photos are from the author’s collection, with the exception of insert image 18, image 19, image 20, image 37 and image 38 © Dominic Peters; image 22 © Jon Krakauer.
Material quoted on p. vii from All Said and Done © Simone de Beauvoir; p. 15, “I Go Back to May 1937” © Sharon Olds; p. ix, “Dying in the Wild” © The New York Times; p. 107, Growing Wings © Kristen Jongen; p. 187, Doctor Zhivago © Boris Pasternak.
While every effort has beenv made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein and secure permissions, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future edition of this book.
Carine McCandless asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Find out more about HarperCollins and the environment at
Source ISBN: 9780007585137
Ebook Edition © November 2014 ISBN: 9780007585144 Version: 2014-10-28
CONTENTS
Copyright
Epigraph
Foreword
Prologue
Part One: Worth
Part Two: Strength
Part Three: Unconditional Love
Part Four: Truth
Picture Section
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Publisher
For Chris
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth; and truth rewarded me.
—Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done
On September 14, 1992, I got a phone call from Mark Bryant, the editor of Outside magazine, who sounded unusually animated. Skipping the small talk, he told me about a snippet he’d just read in the New York Times that he couldn’t stop thinking about:
DYING IN THE WILD, A HIKER RECORDED THE TERROR
Last Sunday a young hiker, stranded by an injury, was found dead at a remote camp in the Alaskan interior. No one is yet certain who he was. But his diary and two notes found at the camp tell a wrenching story of his desperate and progressively futile efforts to survive.
The diary indicates that the man, believed to be an American in his late 20’s or early 30’s, might have been injured in a fall and that he was then stranded at the camp for more than three months. It tells how he tried to save himself by hunting game and eating wild plants while nonetheless getting weaker.
One of his two notes is a plea for help, addressed to anyone who might come upon the camp while the hiker searched