The McCandless Mecca: A Pilgrimage to the Magic Bus of the Stampede Trail - Paperback

by Josh Spice (Photographer), Ken Ilgunas (Author)

"The Stampede Trail has become a passageway on which hikers and hunters, seekers and sportsmen, Speedoed mountain bikers and North Slope militiamen cross paths. The Magic Bus is becoming a national shrine, a holy pilgrim site, a modern-day Mecca. And I was determined to see it, too." So writes Ken Ilgunas, who, in the summer of 2011, moved up to Alaska to, like thousands before him, embark on a pilgrimage to explore the storied bus of the Stampede Trail-the very bus in which Chris McCandless of Into the Wild died twenty years before. What was supposed to be little more than a "literary tour" of a book that Ilgunas had "merely enjoyed," would become a humorous, thought-provoking, and, at times, treacherous journey to the very heart of Alaska.

Author Biography

Ken Ilgunas is an author, journalist, and backcountry ranger in Alaska. He has hitchhiked ten thousand miles across North America, paddled one thousand miles across Ontario in a birchbark canoe, and walked 1,700 miles across the Great Plains, following the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline. Ilgunas has a BA from SUNY Buffalo in history and English, and an MA in liberal studies from Duke University. The author of Walden on Wheels, Trespassing Across America, and This Land Is Our Land, he is from Wheatfield, New York.