Outside Magazine

Dear Editor of Outside Magazine,

This letter is in regards to the article that you ran on Christopher McCandless. I have to say that I was truly left inspired by the journey of this man and was amazed by the stories of his escapades. How one man could survive by himself living purely off the good of the land is unbelievable, and to think that after such an amazing journey that he's fall was due to a bad plant is just heartbreaking. Although McCandless's story is inspirational and motivating there are some things that left me questioning his actions. Why would a young man go all by himself into the uninhabited wild of Alaska, of all places, with barely enough supplies to withstand normal circumstances? While this is extremelly impressive, it's just dumb. He never had any proper training in survival techniques, although I'm sure with a brain like his he did do some sort of research, but still even the most risktaking daredevils don't adventure into the wild with no more than a bag of rice and a tiny rifle. It stated that he had always succeeded in everything that he did and maybe since he never had to face failure in his life it made him feel invinsible. Which shows how naive and ignorant he was. It was as if he felt that luck was so much on his side that nothing would ever happen to him, and I guess if one never experiences failure they would get that same sense. But if he were really as intelligent as the article claimed then he would have had at least enough sense to know that when dealing with nature and uncontrolable elements there's no knowing what's going to happen and that's its better to be safe then sorry. Which makes me question his intent of the journey. Now I don't think that he really intended on trying to committ suicide but when all you do is challenge yourself with things of either life or death resultants, aren't you in a way tempting fate? Although even though he did have kind of a conceited err about him in respect to his feelings of invinsibilty, he was still a very simplistic kind of guy. He never asked for anything or any type of recognition, he simply just wanted to live with the elements in nature.