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"We're treating it as a relic more than as a vehicle," Brian Howard said of the preservation of Bus 142, the 1946 International Harvester K-5 better known as the "Into the Wild" bus. "It's gone way beyond what its function once was, from an automobile to a hunting camp to a quasi-religious shrine, and we're trying to maintain all of that."
Which, as Howard admits, is easier said than done. The stakeholders in this bus are numerous, from the staff and curators at the University of Alaska's Museum of the North, where the bus now resides; to the Alaska Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which technically owns the bus; to the Alaskan communities in which the bus was once located; to the family and followers of Christopher McCandless, the young adventurer who died in the bus and whose tale Jon Krakauer told in his 1997 book. In addition, the bus as an artifact itself tells dozens, if not hundreds of stories about people from all over the globe, all of which Howard has been tasked to preserve.
When the U.S. Army sent a helicopter to lift the bus from its long-held spot in the Alaska wilderness in June of 2020, however, there was little thought given to that task. Instead, as the Alaska DNR noted at the time, it had become a public nuisance and a danger. Located about 25 miles west of Healy, Alaska, far from any road, it could be reached only by foot and only by crossing nearby rivers. Nevertheless, plenty of people, inspired either by Krakauer's book or the 2007 Sean Penn-directed movie based on it, tried to see this place where McCandless spent 114 days in an attempt to leave civilization behind and to live off the land. Two of those people died in separate incidents in 2010 and 2019, and multiple others have had to be rescued while attempting to reach the bus, ultimately leading local residents to call for the bus's removal to prevent further deaths.
Read on to discover how the bus was retrieved and preserved.
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