Quétinbec wrote:

Because young Americans will only get off their asses and see another part of the world if they can pretend it's due to impressive policial or spiritual motivations. It's part of the 'greatest nation on earth' complex. My rule of thumb for avoiding these cunts in India was not to make eye contact with any American unless they were wearing a digital watch. A guy with a digital watch doesn't fuck about.

And McCandkiss was wrong about nature. Apart from small and medium sized waterfalls, it's quite shit and often not worth the bother.

Also, see if this doesn't change your (positive) opinion about the guy...

http://www.mensjournal.com/feature/M162/M162_TheCultofChrisMcCandless.html

A year younger than McCandless would have been today had he lived, Keith has a distinctly Alaskan viewpoint on his death, unsentimental and unswayed by romanticism. He points to a clear pool in a stream not 50 feet from the bus, in which dozens of foot-long grayling swim against the current. "You could practically shovel those out with a spruce branch," he tells me. "And I just don't get why he didn't stay down by the Teklanika until the water got low enough to cross. Or walk upstream to where it braids out in shallow channels. Or start a signal fire on a gravel bar." He peers inside the bus and shakes his head at what he sees as a greenhorn in over his head who had retreated to the only sign of civilization for miles when he realized he couldn't make it. "Tough enough to live out here without trying harder," he says. "We're hard up for heroes if that's what it takes -- some guy who starved to death in a bus."

But as Krakauer noted -- and a 9,000-word piece by Chip Brown in a February 1993 New Yorker made clear -- had McCandless searched a bit farther downstream he would have discovered a manual tram over the river less than a mile from where he tried to cross, a detail missing from the film.