![]() ![]() “Obviously, this particular river holds special interest to a lot of people because of that story,” Hill said. The vast majority of Alaska rivers, including the Teklanika behind which McCandless died, aren’t monitored by United States Geological Survey stream monitors and have little in the way of historical data. You see something and say, ‘Why is that the way it was?’ There was some personal satisfaction to adding to this story.”īut the processes by which Hill examined the hydrological question could help other scientists model other poorly documented rivers. ![]() “Those are the kind of things that I find interesting to work on. “To me, it was sort of an interesting challenge and an interesting exploration of an unresolved question,” he said. The project was partly a challenge for Hill, who’d read the book when it was published in 1996. Had his attempt occurred a bit on either side of that day, the conditions might have been more favorable and the outcome may have been different for him.” “The specific day of his attempted crossing – J– coincided with a large amount of rainfall-driven runoff. McCandless had unfortunate timing,” Hill, a professor of civil engineering, said in a news release. The findings? Hill and water resources graduate student Christina Aragon of the OSU College of Engineering concluded that McCandless was thwarted by high flows in the Teklanika River because of an intense, short-lived runoff event. Months later, that sleuthing culminated in a unique study, which was published in Frontiers in Earth Science earlier this month. ![]() “Then it became a little bit of a detective work, if you will.” “I did some searching and didn’t come up with anything,” he said. But after seeing that particular scene, David Hill, a professor at Oregon State University, was left with a specific scientific question: What was going on, hydrologically speaking, with that river? The true story raises profound questions about belonging, the human-nature relationship, naïve arrogance, familial trauma and more. Days later, he died deep in the Alaska backcountry. A pivotal scene, in both the book and movie, shows Chris McCandless trying to cross a swollen river, and failing. Earlier this year, a hydrologist watched “Into The Wild,” a movie based on the eponymous nonfiction book about the life and death of an iconoclast adventurer. ![]()
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