Alexander Supertramp

Retired on Wheels or the Birding Traveler, BJ's blog has some great pics and is a little more current then mine!

Does that name ring a bell to you? It did not for me until we got to the campground area right outside Denali National Park and Preserve. The small "settlement" which is mostly tourist support activities is Healy, AK.

NOTE: If you do not know what geocaching is, the rest of this post will probably not mean much to you or, to but it more bluntly, it will be a waste of your time.  If you are interested in finding out a little bit about it, go to GeoCache for Beginners BJ and I have enjoyed some places we would never have known about if we did not geocache.  Some fun places, some beautiful views, some great exercise and now that our girls (granddaughters) are old enough to participate we are going to enjoy it even more!

While in Healy, AK I was interested in doing some geocaches as normal and I noticed a series of them with "Supertramp" in their name, i.e. Supertramp Bus, Supertramp Lake, Supertramp Overlook, etc.  I looked into it further and found they were all along Stampede Trail that was a road off the Parks Highway (the  highway between Anchorage and Fairbanks and it goes by Denali). The first few miles were paved then it turned to gravel. About 8 miles in it turned into a pretty large permanent mud puddle which varied in depth depending on rain.

On the Stampede Trail!

Well I found out with Floy's help that Alexander Supertramp was a name used by Chris McCandless, a young man who decided to wander around the US after graduating from Emory University.   He eventually ended up in AK and was looking for some solitude in the wilderness. He found a bus in  the wilderness used by hunters and lived there the last several months of his life.  Apparently he gave it little forethought and had inadequate supplies and knowledge for this adventure. He was eventually found in his "magic" bus dead in August 1992.

.John Krakauer wrote an article about the young man  and his adventure and death for Outside magazine the next year and in 1996 wrote and published a book Into the Wild about McCandless and his adventure and death.. Sean Penn made a movie about this in 2007.

As far as I could get while there was the first geocache right before the permanent mud puddle.

The permanent mud puddle!

I was still 21 miles from the "magic bus" that McCandless lived in for several months and eventually died in. I thought some of the businesses running ATV tours might have trips out there, but none did and none were interested.  Turns out McCandless has a number of detractors in AK who think he was "stupid" for lack of a better word for going off so ill prepared in mind and equipment.  He received plenty of advice not to and ignored it all and paid with his life!

Below are the links to several of the the geocaches. The first one is the goal, the "magic bus" and then several others.  I think you will be able to see most of the info. If you are a registered user you will see it all.  The geocaches were placed by a local guy in the Summer of 2012 and have not been visited a lot partially due to their difficulty.  A number of folks have done the closer ones as I have.  And, while getting the links together I just found out someone else did it yesterday, 29 Jun.  He did it the easy way though.  See picture below.  However, I noted this individual did not fool with the "trail of GCs" he just went straight to the bus!  Don't know what it costs, but I am sure it was not cheap!

The easy way to get to the magic bus!

Here are links to the geocache description. If you scroll down thru the logs at the bottom you can click on some picture that were posted with the log entry. Most do not have pics with the logs but some do and there are some neat ones, especially in the first link below showing folks travelling to the cache in the winter!

SuperTramp Bus (aka the Magic Bus)

SuperTramp Overlook

SuperTramp Beaver Lake


Always at home, no matter where we are!!