75 pages • 2 hours read
Jon KrakauerInto The Wild
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Detrital Wash”
Chris McCandless arrives at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area on July 6 and drives his Datsun to the south shore of the lake. It is 120 degrees Fahrenheit. He camps at the edge of Detrital Wash. It rains for a week, flooding the wash and rendering his car temporarily unusable. McCandless decides to abandon the car, bury the license plates and some of his possessions, and burn the $123 of cash he is carrying. On July 10 he hikes around the lake but suffers from heat stroke. He returns to the road.
For the next two months McCandless hitchhikes around the West, moving through Lake Tahoe, the Sierra Nevada, and the Pacific Crest Trail. He works in Northern California, where he is picked up by a woman named Jan Burres and her partner, Bob. Chris goes to Carthage, where he meets and works for Wayne Westerberg. On October 28 he goes to Needles, California, and walks overland to Arizona, where he buys a canoe and decides to paddle down the Colorado River. During this journey, he sends a postcard to Westerberg from Yuma, Arizona, thanking him for his hospitality.
McCandless makes it to Mexico by way of the Colorado River but soon gets lost in a series of canals. He grows disheartened until he is given a ride to the sea by passersby. From El Golfo de Santa Clara, McCandless camps and paddles by sea along the coast for the next month. An incident forces him to abandon his canoe on January 16. He walks to the US border and spends the next six weeks moving throughout the Southwest United States. On February 24, after nearly eight months on the move, he goes back to Detrital Wash and unburies his possessions. Shortly afterward he gets a job at an Italian restaurant in Las Vegas, but he quits and takes to the road again after only a few weeks.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Bullhead City”
McCandless doesn’t keep a journal again until he goes to Alaska the following year, so not much is known about his travels after he leaves Las Vegas in May 1991. By October McCandless arrives in Bullhead City, Arizona, a small, unremarkable town full of fast-food joints and strip malls. He spends two months there, the longest amount of time he spends anywhere until he goes to Alaska in 1992. He holds a full-time job at McDonalds.
While working at McDonalds, McCandless tries to conceal the fact that he is homeless. He sleeps in a vacant mobile home offered to him by a man who finds him shaving in a restroom. In November McCandless reaches out to Jan Burres by mail and shortly afterward arrives at her campsite in an area called The Slabs, outside of Niland, California. An abandoned naval air base, The Slabs plays home to more than 5,000 drifters in the winter. McCandless works for Burres at her flea market book stand. The young daughter of a couple of vagabonds at The Slabs falls in love with McCandless, but he does not return her interest. Instead, McCandless likes to tease and flirt with Jan Burres. He befriends many of the people he meets there and tells them about his plans to go to Alaska.
Eventually, McCandless decides to leave. Jan Burres drives McCandless to the post office in Salton City, 50 miles west, and gives McCandless some knives at their departure.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Anza-Borrego”
After leaving the company of Jan Burres, McCandless hikes into Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and sets up camp. To his east is the Salton Sea. McCandless sleeps on a rise under a tarp and walks or hitchhikes into town for water and provisions. One day in January, an 80-year-old man named Ron Franz gives McCandless a ride back from Salton City to his camp. Franz had previously served in the army. In 1957 his wife and child were killed by a drunk driver. Meeting McCandless revived his paternal instincts. That Sunday Franz returns to McCandless’s camp, and the two spend the day together driving around.
McCandless and Franz become friends. Franz teaches McCandless the craft of leatherworking. When McCandless decides to go to San Diego to make money ahead of his Alaska trip, Franz drives him in. McCandless has trouble finding work in San Diego and hops trains up to Seattle before returning to Franz in California. He stays only for a night. Franz drives McCandless to Grand Junction, Colorado. Along the way Franz asks McCandless if he can adopt him as his son. McCandless evades the question.
On March 14 Franz drops McCandless off on the highway outside of Grand Junction. Franz feels hurt as he drives back to Southern California. In April he receives a long letter from McCandless, in which McCandless tells Franz that he hopes the old man will take up a life on the road similar to McCandless’s own. Inspired by the letter, Franz moves to the campsite in the desert where McCandless had stayed. He stays there for eight months, hoping for McCandless’s return, but by the end of 1992 Franz returns to Salton City, picking up two hitchhikers on the way. He describes McCandless’s adventures to them, and one of the hitchhikers tells Franz that McCandless has died; he read about the death in Outside magazine. In response to McCandless’s death, Franz renounces his religious beliefs and returns to drinking.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These chapters describe McCandless’s two years of travel before his final trip to Alaska. These two years are crucial to the development of McCandless’s story, as they provide a context against which the Alaskan trip is set. Far from heading into the wild completely inexperienced in essential matters of survival, McCandless proved during these years that he was capable of surviving in a number of difficult circumstances.
Perhaps the most consequential of these experiences was McCandless’s long journey through Mexico by canoe. For more than a month McCandless survived by eating only rice and marine life gathered as he traveled. This made him confident that he could live off the land for long periods of time without succumbing to starvation. As Krakauer says, the canoe journey “would later convince him he could survive on similarly meager rations in the Alaska bush” (36).
As in the first three chapters, Krakauer uses the accounts of those who met McCandless during his travels to shed light on his character. The more accounts Krakauer provides, the fuller and more complex McCandless’s character is revealed to be. It is suggested, for example, that he rejected sensuality. He refused a gift of warm clothing from Jan Burres, and he often refused help or extra favors from those he met, which suggests he was principled and unselfish. As with Jim Gallien in Chapter 1, McCandless made a favorable impression on nearly everyone he ran into. He became part of the community during his stay at The Slabs, and he made such an impression on Franz that Franz asked if he could adopt McCandless. These anecdotes help prove that McCandless was a complicated but essentially good person. Taken together with the stories of McCandless’s skillful self-sufficiency, the stories of McCandless’s travels inform Krakauer’s argument that his story is worth telling and his death worth mourning.
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