![]() ![]() Many others needed to be rescued on pilgrimages to the bus, finally prompting the state of Alaska to enlist the National Guard to airlift it from the Stampede Trail with a Chinook helicopter on June 18, 2020. In the years following McCandless’ death and the “Into the Wild” book and movie, two hikers died in the river trying to visit Bus 142, which had been hauled into the wilderness in the 1950s so workers could live in it while upgrading a route to an antimony mine. “Connecting relative changes in streamflow to hydraulic estimates of how velocity and stage vary with streamflow is a useful step toward understanding the ups and downs of the Teklanika River,” said Hill. Though the researchers don’t have access to all the information necessary to say what the actual patterns of water elevation and velocity were at the Stampede Trail crossing of the Teklanika River in July 1992, the modeling techniques shed a great deal of light on the main driver of what makes a river fast and impassable: water quantity. Geological Survey maintained a gauge on the Teklanika River for 10 consecutive years, but that ended in 1974.” “Remoteness, harshness and sheer scale mean many river basins are not gauged with the same coverage as those in the lower 48. “Alaska is a challenge in terms of long-term gauging datasets,” Aragon said. Also in 1992, mean daily temperature was a month slower than usual in rising above freezing, and summer rainfall was more intense than it normally is.Įxactly what that means in terms of streamflow and river hydraulics is hard to know, the researchers note, partly because of the difficulties associated with river monitoring in the nation’s largest, wildest state. 30, 1992 – the Teklanika watershed received just under 27 inches of precipitation, 20% greater than average. Streamflow in summer 1992 was more variable than usual because of the quick snowmelt followed by periods of heavy rain.”įor the 1992 water year – the period of Oct. After that, the river got higher or lower on roughly a weekly basis depending on rain in the region. “When the snowmelt finally happened, it happened fast. McCandless to cross the river and reach Bus 142 at the end of April,” Aragon said. “The spring snowmelt in 1992 was delayed, which kept flows in the Teklanika relatively low and made it possible for Mr. Several weeks later when he sought to leave the wilderness, he found the river impassable, returned to the bus and died of starvation on Aug. McCandless had hiked west along the Stampede Trail near Healy, Alaska, forded the Teklanika on April 28 and lived in Bus 142, an abandoned Fairbanks city transit vehicle, 8.6 miles from the river. This paper sheds a little more light about a key event during that period – his attempt to return to civilization halfway through his Alaska adventure.” “Over the three decades that have passed since Chris McCandless perished in Alaska, I’ve been eager to learn as much as possible about his experience from the moment he ‘walked into the wild’ in April 1992 until his death inside Bus 142 some four months later. “David and Christina’s paper is fascinating to me for deeply personal reasons,” Krakauer said. The goal was to compare the 1992 hydrology of the Alaska Range to other years and the July 5, 1992, Teklanika River conditions to the days before and after. Using all of the relevant data they could obtain involving weather, land cover and elevation, Hill and Aragon applied a collection of computer models that have been widely used in snowy, high-latitude locations including Alaska. “The two most significant drivers of streamflow are the patterns of precipitation and temperature.” “Those and many other complex processes determine the places water goes, how much of it goes where, and when it goes,” he said. How much water flows in a stream at any given time is determined by a combination of many factors, Hill said, including precipitation, snowmelt and evaporation, as well as infiltration of water into the soil. Had his attempt occurred a bit on either side of that day, the conditions might have been more favorable and the outcome may have been different for him.”įindings were published in Frontiers in Earth Science. “The specific day of his attempted crossing – J– coincided with a large amount of rainfall-driven runoff. McCandless had unfortunate timing,” said Hill, a professor of civil engineering. ![]() Three decades after Christopher McCandless died in the Alaska wilderness, hydrologist David Hill and water resources graduate student Christina Aragon of the OSU College of Engineering conclude that McCandless was thwarted by high flows in the Teklanika River because of an intense, short-lived runoff event. – The ill-fated “Into the Wild” adventurer chronicled by author Jon Krakauer and film director Sean Penn may have been able to cross the river that turned him back had he tried a day earlier or later, research by Oregon State University suggests. ![]()
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