The McCandless Mecca: A Pilgrimage to the Magic Bus of the Stampede Trail

The Stampede Trail has become a passageway on which hikers and hunters, seekers and sportsmen, Speedoed mountain bikers and North Slope militiamen cross paths. The Magic Bus is becoming a national shrine, a holy pilgrim site, a modern-day Mecca. And I was determined to see it, too. So writes Ken Ilgunas, who, in the summer of 2011, moved up to Alaska to, like thousands before him, embark on a pilgrimage to explore the storied bus of the Stampede Trail-the very bus in which Chris McCandless of Into the Wild died twenty years before. What was supposed to be little more than a literary tour of a book that Ilgunas had merely enjoyed, would become a humorous, thought-provoking, and, at times, treacherous journey to the very heart of Alaska.