Next in the “I ♥ Fairbanks” series is the Mt. Healy Overlook trail located in Denali National Park, the 49th State Brewery in Healy, and the Christopher McCandless bus, made famous from the book Into the Wild by John Kraukauer. Andy and I headed out last Sunday about 8 in the morning. The drive from Fairbanks to Denali National Park is about 120 miles and takes a little over 2 hours. Don and Donna helped drive.
The Mt. Healy Overlook trail is a short, 4.5 mile hike to an overlook area with a gorgeous view. The hike is labeled strenuous on the Denali Park website, however it’s a pretty simple hike if you are in good shape. It’s likely labeled “strenuous” as the hike is straight up and straight down; there is little flat surface.
We went on this hike on May 10th, and Denali Park and Denali Village didn’t technically open until May 13th. As a result, there weren’t many visitors and the trails were still muddy from left over ice and snow.
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| Donkeys, chillin. |
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| Andy, heading up |
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| Ice covering some of the trail |
Andy had gone on this hike the weekend earlier and suffered a nasty cut on his hand from slipping on the ice. He was pleasantly surprised to find that this time, the park had graveled a narrow trail across the ice which made a huge difference for traction.
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| Ready to tackle the ice! |
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| Taking a rest already |
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| First real view you see slightly above the tree line. Alaska Range is in the background. |
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| Trail heading up |
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| Don and Donna hiking like champs. |
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| Andy couldn’t keep up with them! |
We finally made it to the top! Beautiful views of the Alaska Range, Denali Park, and Denali Village.
At this point, you can continue on to the actual summit of Mt. Healy, which sits at 5,400 feet above sea level. There’s a faint trail that beings where the Overlook Trail ends, but eventually the trail slightly dies out and you have to maintain your hike on the ridgeline. Andy and I have hiked to the top of Mt. Healy a couple times from this side (there is another entrance outside Denali Park off of the Parks Highway; we use that entrance during our Winter ascents of Mt. Healy). Hiking to the summit of Mt. Healy is significantly more challenging, and there are a couple parts where it would behoove one to have some climbing gear. It’s really only recommended if you are in terrific shape, have some climbing experience, and have plenty of hours to get up and back (check out this Topo Map for a better idea of what you’re looking at).
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| You can see the trail to the right heads towards the summit |
Andy and I have attempted to summit Mt. Healy in the Winter from the Parks Highway entrance, but we’ve been stymied each time. The cold and darkness sets in pretty fast, and it’s very dicey at the top. One of these days we’ll make it up in Winter and have blog to prove it! Here’s a great article on the Fairbanks News Miner that illustrates the climb from the Parks Highway side pretty well (done in Summer, however, not Winter). The climb from the Denali Park entrance is very different and a bit more manageable (IMO).
Point being, Mt. Healy Overlook Trail is very different from summiting Mt. Healy. Know the difference and do your homework if you choose to summit!
After our “stroll” up to the Mt. Healy Overlook Trail (which it really is in comparison to climbing to the summit), we continued along the Parks Highway further into Denali Park. The Denali Park Road (the road into Denali Park, not to be confused with the Parks Highway), is a 92 mile road into Denali National Park. Driving it without stopping from one end to the next takes about 5 hours. There are three really “main” ways to see the inside of the park, depending on the time you have, how long you want to sit on a bus, whether or not you want to camp and/or backpack, and how many animals you want to see.
Option One: You can drive in yourself by either going the first 15 miles, which is as far as you can go into the park in a private vehicle, or you can enter the Road Lottery and hope to be selected as one of the few cars each summer that get to go all the way in. Road Lottery entries are usually accepted every May, and you are given specific and very limited dates in which you are allowed to drive into the park, if you do indeed win. Names are pulled in June and you have about a 1-in-6 chance of having your name pulled (roughly 1600 winners are chosen each year). Costs $10 to enter the lottery and if you win you have to pay the $25 park entrance fee. While you’re limited in when you can go and there’s no guarantee you’ll win the lottery, if you do win, there’s a lot to be said about adventuring in Denali Park on your own schedule without being beholden to a bus or other tourists.
Option Two: Go on one of the two major bus tours into the park, either the Denali Tundra Wilderness Tour, or the Kantishna Wilderness Tour. Denali Tundra (you can take the Tundra Wilderness Tour or the Teklanika Tundra Wilderness Tour), is a 7.5-9 hour tour that takes about half a day. You go 53 miles into the park. The Tundra tour costs $160.50 for adults and $75.25 for kids. The Teklanika Tundra tour costs $108 for adults and $48.50 for kids. Kantishna Wilderness Tour is a 13 hour, full day tour that covers the entire 92 miles of the Denali Park Road. You can take just the bus tour for $165 or the Bus and Flight combo for $429. Both the Bus and Bus/Flight include snacks and lunch.
Option Three: Take the Camper Bus in. This bus is only for those who are intending to backpack or camp at the Teklanika, Sanctuary, Igloo, or Wonder Lake Campgrounds (info on reservations and permits here). You can take bikes on the bus, although cross your fingers because the bus can only house two bikes. It costs $35 for a camper bus ticket; kids 15 and younger are free. Also, you get a healthy dose of hilarity with this option.
Fortunately for Andy and I, since the park wasn’t officially open yet, they were allowing private vehicles to drive into the park up to the Teklanika Campground. It was a nice stroke of luck; the farther into the park you go, the more animals you see and the better chance you have of getting a glimpse of Mt. McKinley.
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| Caribou along the way |
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| Mt. McKinley in the middle. |
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| Beautiful McKinley! |
We drove as far as we could and turned around. We saw a ton of caribou (there are more caribou in Alaska than people!). Our next stop was the 49th State Brewery for dinner. On our way back down the Parks Highway towards Healy we ran into a bear friend on the side of the road. It was a black bear, which is relatively rare in Denali Park; usually if you run into a bear, it’s a brown bear. Be bear aware!!
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| Andy said his name was Billy. |
We were fortunate to have run into Billy while in our vehicle. Running into Billy while hiking would have been a completely different experience. Learn how to handle Billy here.
After saying goodbye to Billy we drove to the 49th State Brewery in Healy for dinner. The 49th State Brewery is a restaurant and brewery that crafts its own beers. It’s a popular destination for Alaskan beer-lovers and anybody interested in the brewing process. The food is fun and unique; they have a huge menu; check out their yak burger, Mac and cheese varieties, and the seafood salad. Another good find in the area, which we’ve blogged about previously, is 229 Parks Restaurant.
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| Inside the 49th State Restaurant. They have outdoor seating as well. |
The 49th State has a full bar, but of course the fun part is sipping on one of the handcrafted artisan ales and lagers that are brewed right there in the restaurant. They currently have 11 handcrafted beers: Baked Blonde, Solstice IPA, Seward’s Folly, Hibernator, Golden Dahl, Smoked Marzen, Bullinerweisse, 6 Degree Belgian Blonde, McCarthy’s Stout, Vienna Lager, and the Dubbel On Tundra. See the style and ABV (alcohol by volume) here. Their website gives a really great run down of their brewing process as well.
49th State offers brewery tours from April to October. They are available every Friday during those months at 6pm. They are led by the restaurant’s brewers and are followed by a beer tasting (you get four 4 oz. samples of their beers). The brewery also offers private tours that can be scheduled any day. A private tour costs $5 per guest and they can take up to 35 people. Submit a request here.
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| Here’s where the magic happens! |
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| The brewing area is adorned with this reminder to not be a beer baby. |
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| Run down of their brewing process |
What also makes the 49th State a fun destination is it boasts a replica of the Christopher McCandless bus from Into the Wild. Many people mistakenly think it’s the real bus. It’s unfortunately not. However, it is an exact replica and you can go inside the bus and look at some of Chris’s personal items along with a timeline across the walls of the bus depicting his fateful journey into Alaska.
You can’t see the bus without taking your own picture in front of the bus just like Chris did.
The real bus is still sitting out there, rougly 20 miles from the end of Stampede Road. You can technically hike out to it, but as Christopher McCandless so fatefully demonstrated, you better know what you’re doing. Recently, three German tourists ran into the exact same problem Chris did with the rising Teklanika River and had to be rescued by troopers. Here is an article with some advice as to how to get to the real bus. If you choose to go, do so with great caution. It might also be a good idea to do basically the exact opposite of what McCandless did (i.e., be prepared).
Chris was made famous by John Krakauer’s book Into the Wild, which I highly recommend reading if you haven’t. The book is short (only 224 pages), and details Chris’s life and eventual fate in the wilderness of Alaska. If your thirst continues, check out Back to the Wild, which illustrate Chris’s photographs and writings, or The Wild Truth, written by Carine McCandless, Chris’s sister. Chris’s life was portrayed in a movie also titled Into the Wild in 2007, staring Emile Hirsch as Chris McCandless.
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| Peering into the bus |
Christopher McCandless was born in California in a very well-to-do family. The book and movie portray his relationship with his parents as rocky and awkward, with only his sister Carine to give him support. Chris was very intelligent – he graduated from college in 1990 with a double degree in history and anthropology. Writings on Chris’s life describe him as a wanderlust to the greatest degree; a wayward mind dreaming non-stop of his “Alaskan Odyssey” where he would live off the land and completely reject society and all it stood for.
His fateful journey began in Fairbanks, where he was picked up by Jim Gallien, an Alaska electrician who drove him to the head of the Stampede Trail. Story goes Gallien attempted in vain to convince Chris (who was then calling himself Alexander Supertramp) to not go through with his plan to live off the Alaskan land. Chris had zero experience with the Alaskan wilderness, no supplies, no money, and no food. Gallien’s warnings fell on deaf ears, and he reluctantly dropped Chris off on the side of Stampede Road on April 28, 1992. He did convince Chris to take two tuna sandwiches and some rubber boots. Later, Chris’s friends back in California received a couple postcards from him that he had written prior to his hike out into the wilderness.
About 28 miles west of Healy (where the replica bus sits now), Chris found an abandoned Fairbanks Transit bus. He lived, and eventually died, in this bus. He did live off the land, although rather unsuccessfully, hunting porcupines, squirrels, and birds. His first, and arguably largest, mistake (depending upon who you ask), was when he shot a moose and improperly preserved the meat, leading to its spoliation.
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| Inside the replica bus. |
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| Component of the timeline where Chris finds the bus. |
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| Chris wrote a manifesto, which he etched into a wooden table in the bus with a knife. It says: “Two years he walks the Earth. No phone, no pool, 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.” |
Chris kept a journal during his time in the bus, totaling 113 days. His journal entries are of increasing desperation.
Chris did attempt to leave the bus around July but was blocked by the Teklanika River which had risen significantly since he initially crossed it at the end of April. To add insult to injury, it was later discovered that there was a hand operated tram less than a mile down the river Chris could have used, but he was unaware of its existence.
Around the 100th day or so, Chris was too weak to hike much farther beyond the bus and posted the following note on the outside of the bus in hopes a hiker or backpacker would walk by and see it.
Chris’s last journal entry was on August 13, 1992. He had been living in the bus for only about 4 months. He wrote his final words in his journal and ripped out a page from Louis L’Amour’s memoir, Education of a Wandering Man.
Chris’s body was found on September 6, 1992 by a hunter. He had been dead for a little over two weeks and weighed only 66 pounds.
Chris’s cause of death was officially ruled as starvation, but this has been debated ever since his body was discovered. Numerous theories abound and it is unlikely that there will ever be a conclusion on the subject. As it stands now, there are about five theories being tossed around, although I imagine by the time the conversation is done (if it’s ever done), there will be many more. Here are the five; decide for yourself what you believe:
The John Krakauer theory: Krakauer, who wrote Into the Wild suggests that there were two main causes of Chris’s death. One is that Chris was suffering from what’s called “rabbit starvation,” which is when someone’s activity significantly outpaces the protein content of what they were eating (take a look at page 188 of Mr. Krakauer’s book). Second, Krakauer posits that Chris was poisoned by a toxic alkaloid substance called swainsonine found in Hedysarum alpinum seeds. See Mr. Krakauer’s article in the New Yorker.
The Thomas Clausen theory: Dr. Thomas Clausen, the chair of the chemistry and biochemistry department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks did extensive laboratory testing on Hedysarum alpinum seeds and concluded they contained no toxins at all. Dr. Clausen basically affirmed the originally stated cause of death: starvation. See the article in Men’s Journal.
The Ronald Hamilton theory: Mr. Hamilton, a published author and bookbinder, posited a connection between Chris’s symptoms and physical deterioration and the poisoning of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp in Vapniarca. Essentially, Mr. Hamilton suggested that Chris was suffering from lathyrism, caused by paralysis in his legs that then eliminated his ability to hike and hunt for food. Mr. Hamilton stated that lathyrism is caused by ODAP poisoning (a toxic protein) from seeds of the Hedysarum alpinum plant. Mr. Hamilton pointed out that Dr. Clausen’s tests were looking for a toxic alkaloid rather than a protein. Mr. Hamilton’s theory is very similar to John Krakauer’s theory, except for the type of toxin they blame. See his essay on the Chistopher McCandless Info website.
The Craig Medred theory: Reporter Craig Medred suggested in a January 2015 article in the Alaska Dispatch News that mushrooms could have caused Chris’s death. See the Alaska Dispatch article here.
The John Kakauer Theory Part Deux: In February 2015, John Krakauer published a follow up article in The New Yorker suggesting that instead of ODAP as theorized by Dr. Clausen as being the toxic component in the Hedysarum alpinum seeds, the toxin was really L-canavanine. See his follow up article here.
People can’t even agree on how Christopher McCandless should be remembered. I think the prevailing opinion is a positive one; indeed, there is something alluring and romantic about an adventure seeker finding the glorified Alaskan paradox of an Utopian dream-state that ultimately causes death. People come to Alaska for all different reasons, but the main reason is adventure and the hope that there is something still perfectly wild out there. I can sympathize with McCandless’s prisoner-feelings within society and his willingness to take risks to live the life he dreamt of living. Mr. Adam Reed, who made the Christopher McCandless Info website, illustrates this view very well on the site. He compares Chris’s courage to Albert Facey and Chris Kyle; he describes McCandless as “hav[ing] a dream and fulfilling it,” that he was filled with “courage,” and achieved something everyone wants to do but never has the courage to do: “meet the power.”
Conversely (and QUITE conversely at that), many people (myself somewhat included, and most Alaskans included), feel McCandless was naive, ill-prepared, and outrageously irrational. McCandless played an irresponsible game with Alaska, lost, and society responds by romanticizing this absurd halfwit who thought he was indispensable. Some go even farther, including our friend in Theory #4, Mr. Craig Medred. In his article published September 20, 2013, titled The Beatification of Chris McCandless: From Thieving Poacher Into Saint, Mr. Medred writes, “[t]hanks to the magic words – and words can indeed be magic – the poacher Chris McCandless was transformed in his afterlife into some sort of poor, admirable romantic soul lost in the wilds of Alaska, and now appears on the verge of becoming some sort of beloved vampire.” Mr. Medred refers to Chris as a “suicidal wilderness narcissist,” “a bum,” “a thief,” and “a poacher,” worshiped by “self-involved, urban Americans [who are] more detached from nature than any humans in history.”
To a large degree, Mr. Medred is right. Alaska doesn’t play games, and she doesn’t tolerate fools.
Mr. Reed’s website and Mr. Medred’s article show two diametric versions of the man Christopher McCandless was. Read them both and decide for yourself.