News, Come to Alaska, but please don't go 'Wild' (Fairbanks: travel, job)

[John1960]

Even before Christopher McCandless' reincarnation in Sean Penn's new movie Into the Wild, hundreds of intrepid admirers had made pilgrimages to the abandoned city bus where moose hunters discovered McCandless' body near Alaska's Denali National Park and Preserve in fall 1992.
The 24-year-old rebel died of starvation nearly four months after heading down a former gold mining trail with a 22-gauge shotgun and 10-pound bag of rice in a mapless quest to live off the land. He became a backpacker icon when Jon Krakauer chronicled his fate in a non-fiction best seller in 1996

Now, even as they cheer the state's face time on the big screen, many Alaskans worry about a new wave of copycats ill-equipped for the real-life drama of wilderness travel in the Last Frontier.

"If the movie makes more people yearn for Alaska, that's a good thing. But it's our job to channel that yearning," says Deb Hickok of the Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau, which is co-sponsoring an Into the Wild sweepstakes through Oct. 26.

Come to Alaska, but please don't go 'Wild' - USATODAY.com

[Rance]

Let em come. I probably won't feel sorry for those that copycat the movie.

[GoddessofRandomThoughts]

Rance, that is cold!

Ya know, you have to love people. They see a movie about a guy who has a dream and tries to live it out without being
prepared and pays the ultimate price ...Death.

And what do they do? They all want to a) see where he died (too morbid) and b) follow in his foot steps (too stupid).

As a species, apparently we don't learn through example.

[Rance]

We don't need a bunch of wilderness wannabee's drifting around sucking up all of our rescue resources just because they watched a movie, and now want to walk into the wild.

[warptman]

If they made a movie about him, are we going to see a movie on tourists who come to Alaska on a cruise line and lose their lives on a flight seeing trip in southeast? Makes you wonder sometimes.

[Xa'at]

Or are we going to get a new wave of tourists next summer who think that since we are Alaskans we can wander off into the wilderness with just rice (smart, by the way. Rice??! I'd bring freeze dried macaroni!) and pop out two weeks later no worse for the wear. I bet Metlakatla will start boppin' em over the head and leaving them on a deserted Island in the Tongass.

[ltdontcare]

Did you have a lot of Treadwell copy cats? That was pretty well promoted.

[Snootylooter]

Xa'at - don't tell me you are another one of us that is still working their way thru piles of Y2K #10 cans of food - "freeze dried macaroni"!?! Yikes!! Please tell me I'm not the only one

[Metlakatla]

freakin' tourists; I wish they'd stay away and keep their lower 48 bs where it belongs.

Great idea, Xa'at.

[Rance]

Actually they do make good bear fodder. I don't think we had a surge of Treadwell wannabee's. Now that would have been cool!