Allusions in Chapter 17 – Muir & Thoreau “John Muir is remembered primarily as a no-nonsense conservationist and the founding president of the Sierra Club, but he was also a bold adventurer, a fearless scrambler of peaks, glaciers, and waterfalls whose best- known essay includes a riveting account of nearly falling to his death, in 1872, while ascending California’s Mt. Ritter. In another essay Muir rapturously describes riding out a ferocious Sierra gale, by choice, in the uppermost branches of a on-hundred-foot Douglas fir…” (Krakauer 182-183).

Allusions in Chapter 17 – Muir & Thoreau What comparisons can you make between Muir and Chris? Differences between the two? Why do you think Krakauer includes the allusion to Muir in this Chapter?

Allusions in Chapter 17 – Muir & Thoreau “Even staid, prissy Thoreau, who famously declared that it was enough to have ‘traveled a good deal in Concord,’ felt compelled to visit the more fearsome wilds of nineteenth-century Main and climb Mt. Katahdin. His ascent of the peak’s ‘savage and awful, though beautiful’ ramparts shocked and frightened him, but it also induced a giddy sort of awe. The disquietude he felt on Katahdin’s granite heights inspired some of his most powerful writing and profoundly colored the way he thought thereafter about earth in its coarse, undomesticated state” (Krakauer 183).

Allusions in Chapter 17 – Muir & Thoreau What comparisons can you make between Thoreau’s Mt. Katahdin adventure and Chris’s into the wild? Differences between the two? Why do you think Krakauer includes this allusion to Thoreau in this Chapter?

Allusions in Chapter 17 – Muir & Thoreau “Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul. He soon discovered, however, what Muir and Thoreau already knew: An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one’s attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, the land and all it holds” (Krakauer 183).

Chapter 17 – Closing Discussion Find me one more quote from this Chapter that you think effectively contributes toward Krakauer’s purpose for writing the book. It doesn’t need to relate to Muir or Thoreau, but can if you want. Be prepared to explain how/why.