The McCandless Mecca: A Pilgrimage To The Magic Bus Of The Stampede Trail

by Ken Ilgunas

Overview

"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 author and adventurer Ken Ilgunas, who, in the summer of 2011, moved up to Alaska and, like thousands before him, embarked on 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" to a bus from a book that Ilgunas had "merely enjoyed" would become a humorous, enthralling, and, at times, treacherous journey, leading him to the very heart of Alaska.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940045427371
Publisher:	Ken Ilgunas
Publication date:	11/02/2013
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	228,742
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Ken Ilgunas (1983-) was born in Hamilton, Ontario and raised in Niagara Falls, NY. He's worked as an elementary school tutor, an Alaskan tour guide, and a backcountry ranger at the Gates of the Arctic National Park. He's hitchhiked 10,000 miles across North America, canoed across Ontario, Canada in a birch bark canoe, and hiked the length of the controversial 1,700-mile Keystone XL Pipeline. For two years, he lived in his van at Duke University so he could receive his graduate degree in liberal studies debt-free. Ilgunas currently lives on a farm in Stokes County, North Carolina.