"Into the Wild" bus may soon find a new home at the University of Alaska's Museum of the North
By Daniel Strohl
- Jul 31, 2020
Bus 142 during the airlift operation in June 2020. Photo courtesy Alaska Department of Natural Resources.
Scrap it, some people suggested after the Alaska Department of Natural Resources asked the state's Army National Guard to remove Bus 142--the old Fairbanks transit bus made famous by Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild"--from where it had sat for decades earlier this summer. Others suggested putting it back. But in the end, it appears the DNR will keep it and loan it to the University of Alaska's Museum of the North for preservation and display.
“Of the many expressions of interest in the bus, the proposal from the UA Museum of the North best met the conditions we at DNR had established to ensure this historical and cultural object will be preserved in a safe location where the public could experience it fully, yet safely and respectfully, and without the specter of profiteering,” DNR Commissioner Corri Feige said in a press release.
Typically, when the Alaska DNR removes abandoned vehicles from state property, it'll either scrap the vehicles or sell them off by public auction. However, as the DNR noted in a document outlining its decision-making process for the dilapidated bus in which Christopher McCandless died in 1992 after living in and around it for nearly four months, "The Bus should be reestablished at a location in Alaska that is open to the public, allowing the public to safely visit the Bus without requiring a potentially dangerous river crossing to the area where the Bus was previously located" and "consideration for the final disposition of the Bus should be respectful to the families that have lost loved ones, to public sentiment, and should avoid the appearance of profiteering or exploiting, specifically, the death of Chris McCandless."
Typically, removing abandoned vehicles from state property also goes without notice from the general public, but the many news articles about the removal of the bus by helicopter from its location about 25 miles west of Healy, Alaska, led to just as many unsolicited proposals from around the country to take the bus off the state's hands. One of those proposals came from Patrick Druckenmiller, a professor of geology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the director of the university's Museum of the North.
Druckenmiller noted that the museum, "one of three official state repositories recognized as able to accept and curate state-owned items of historic importance," would be the most appropriate institution to care for the bus, not the least because it's the closest major museum to "where the most famous 114 days of its history occurred" and because the bus originated as part of the Fairbanks Transit system.
The 1946 International Harvester K-5 did indeed ply the roads of Fairbanks for a time before the Yutan Construction Company bought it to use for housing employees during the construction of a mining access road between Lignite and Stampede. Yutan, in turn, abandoned the bus in 1961 and over the subsequent years it became a wilderness shelter for hikers and hunters alike.
McCandless, one of the former, hitchhiked to Alaska in the spring of 1992 and made use of the bus as a shelter until he died in September of that year. Krakauer's subsequent 1996 book--and the Sean Penn 2007 movie based on it--in turn inspired other hikers to visit the bus, a dangerous proposition because it involved trying to cross nearby rivers. Two of those hikers then died in separate incidents in 2010 and 2019, and multiple others have had to be rescued while attempting to reach the bus, ultimately leading local residents to call for the bus's removal to prevent further deaths.
According to Druckenmiller's initial proposal, "exhibition plans remain wide open for discussion," though he floated the idea of possibly placing the stabilized bus "in a quiet, wooded area directly to the north of our museum" with access to the bus via a trail and interpretive signs that would relate the bus's history.
The DNR and the museum are currently working on a memorandum of understanding that will lead to the transfer of the bus to the museum.
SOURCE: HEMMINGS