North American Bear Center. 1926 Highway 169 PO Box 161 Ely, MN 55731 (218) 365-7879 (877) 365-7879 email protected. House of Blues Las Vegas presented by Cricket Wireless - Las Vegas. The concert itself and the show blackbear put on was amazing, but we werent let in the venue until 7 which was when the concert.was supposed to start, then we waited until 8:30 when the openers finally went on and after that at 9:30 he finally went on but after that the concert was amazing!!!

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Chris McCandless walked away from the world, drawn by a lethal flirtation with the power to be free of everything.
By Chip Brown

The New Yorker
February 8, 1993

It would have been better to go on the ground, as the boy had gone when he came in to the country in the spring, but it was a time between seasons, and the rivers were just beginning to freeze and could not yet be crossed on snow machines. It had been five weeks since the police had removed the body of Chris McCandless from the back of the old bus on the Sushana River, the makeshift hunting shelter where he had spent the summer scratching for berries and wild meat. Alaska’s brief autumn had flashed across the tundra, and now the plains and mountains north of Denali (still officially named Mt. McKinley) were knee-deep in snow.

So, a helicopter. We left from the mining town of Healy, on the main highway, and headed west, up a sweeping valley. A thousand feet below, sparse stands of spruce marked the course of the Savage River; beyond it lay the winding depression of the Teklanika River Valley, with its ice-bordered stretches of opened black water and, on the far side, a string of beaver ponds that looked like a staircase of frozen rice paddies. The Stampede Trail, an old mining road, was still visible, zigging through forest, zagging over ridges. Ten miles more and it entered a clearing where a green rattletrap bus was incongruously parked at the confluence of two streams.

Butch Killian, a blue-eyed Healy coal miner and hunter, who was riding in the back of the helicopter, had spent many nights in the Sushana bus. As the newspapers had reported, he had been stalking moose five weeks earlier along the northern boundary of Denali National Park, and had arrived at the bus in his all-terrain vehicle at dusk, intending to lay up for the night and make the twenty-eight miles cross-country to Healy in the morning. A bad odor stopped him. From the window he saw what looked to be a man in a sleeping bag on the mattress inside. He got on the radio to the Healy Fire Department, where he served as a volunteer: “Dispatch, this is Butch. You might want to call the troopers. There’s a dead man in the bus at Sushana.”

Now the chopper whirled down in a stylish spiral and landed in the snowy yard near the faded green hulk of Fairbanks City Transit System 142. The prop-wash blew the snow of the bus’s yellow hood. The air was punishingly cold. Killian led the way to the door at the back.

“The smell’s gone,” he said, stepping inside. There was room to stand; good light; the air was much warmer. Apart from a few items that the troopers had removed with the body, Chris McCandless’s meager wherewithal was lying as he had left it: on the front table, his frayed toothbrush and tube of Colgate, a blue-handled knife, the crown of a molar; on a chair, his dungarees; by a barrel stove, his Great Lakes boots; on a cot against the wall, his blue pack with the foam pad still rolled and tied, and his little library, including a coverless copy of “Walden.” One of the windows of the bus had been knocked out to make room for a fifteen-foot spruce trunk; one end of the log was stuck into the mouth of the barrel stove like a tongue depressor. An experienced outdoorsman would have an axe to piece up his firewood, not the dull machete propped by the door.

The mattress of the bed was torn and stained and strewn with things – a net that McCandless had worn over his head to keep the bugs away, an open copy of “Doctor Zhivago,” a pair of gloves, a black pen, Chap Stick, toenail clippers, iodine pills, a green water bottle filled now with ice, and a pair of silver-framed eyeglasses, neatly folded. He was nearsighted.

“I might have to put a tarp down before I sleep there again,” Butch Killian said. We laughed; we were nervous, and the presence in the room was so strong that it seemed rude of us to have barged in uninvited. It was as if Chris McCandless had just gone down to the stream to fetch water or were off collecting wood. We stayed about an hour. We returned to the helicopter. Our breath fogged the Plexiglas as the chilled engine shuddered to life.

Christopher J. McCandless, whose body was brought back from the Sushana River bus last fall, was one of the many seekers drawn north by the mythic Alaska – the Alaska that belongs as much to the estate of the imagination as to the actual earth, and which sustains the crowded parts of America with the sentimental idea of a last frontier. What he had envisioned before he came was the Alaska of shining mountains and immense herds and smoke curling above archetypal cabins – a far cry from the base world of insects, darkness, and death. During the fortnight that the state troopers withheld his name while they canvassed the country for his next of kin (even getting in touch with a Santa Barbara wrecking company whose name was on the T-shirt he died in), the newspapers referred to McCandless simply as “the hiker.” If the authorities did not know whom he belonged to, they at least knew some of what had happened. Along with the body, they had recovered an SOS note, which he had signed and taped to a window of the bus, and a terse journal, which he had kept on the back pages of a book of plant lore. There were also self-portraits he had made with his 35mm. camera. One of the photographs was faxed to law-enforcement agencies around the country.

The blue sleeping bag containing his remains was sent to Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, in Anchorage, where an autopsy was conducted. The advanced decomposition of the skeletal figure made it impossible to set a precise date of death. No sign of injury was found. The large muscles of the arms and legs were extensively wasted and there was a complete absence of fat under the skin. A five-foot-eight-inch, twenty-four-year-old man who, it was later learned, had weighed a hundred and thirty-three pounds when he got a driver’s license from the state of Virginia several years before., weighed sixty-seven pounds at the time of his autopsy. The autopsy findings concurred with the conclusion the troopers had arrived at on the basis of entries in the diary: the hiker had died of starvation.

And so Chris McCandless took his place in the long line of travelers whose last days in some far corner of the world resonate in poignant words. Starvation, the prosaic horror of every age, has a kind of evil poetry in the literature of misadventure, and what we remember is not the deaths of the sixty thousand people who succumb to hunger daily but the fate of Scott and his party, who perished of starvation and exposure on their way back from the South Pole, eighty years ago – an ordeal preserved in Scott’s diary with the famous closing line “For God’s sake, look a

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