Ruess, like Christopher McCandless, disappeared into the wild. Davis Gulch has petro glyphs left behind by the Anasazi people and a carving left in 1993 by a young man named Everett Ruess. Krakauer begins Chapter 9 with a description of a Southwestern canyon called Davis Gulch, a watershed in the middle of a desert. Krakauer then differentiates McCandless from these three men and introduces a 20-year-old boy, Everett Ruess as the fourth comparison. The narrator also draws parallels between McCandless and Carl McCunn. Waterman, an ace mountain climber who had suffered multiple psychiatric breakdowns in his life, died while attempting to summit the treacherous Denali peak. He committed suicide just before he was planning to live a life on the road. Wealthy and intelligent, Rosellini earned several advanced degrees and then became an exercise fanatic. Krakauer gives biographical portraits of three men, Gene Rosellini, the mountain climber John Mallon Waterman, and the photographer Carl McCunn in support of his and the reader’s understanding of Christopher McCandless. Krakauer establishes his own authority and sets himself up to refute McCandless’s detractors by establishing his familiarity with the history of American outdoorsmen and thrill seekers. The narrator then gives other examples of men who became drifters, including personal encounters from his travels in Alaska and as a mountaineer. Many termed McCandless as a familiar type, a starry-eyed incompetent running away from his problems or a nihilist with suicidal tendencies. He quotes a number of letters from experienced campers and Alaska residents to the magazine criticising McCandless' trip as too romantic and dangerously foolhardy. Jon Krakauer explains the reception of his 1993 Outdoor Magazine article about McCandless’s death that he began in Chapter Six.
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