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CHRIS McCANDLESS, the self-described “aesthetic voyager whose home is the road,” died on Alaska’s Stampede Trail in August of 1992. His death followed a two-year cross-country odyssey, a “spiritual pilgrimage” that took him from Atlanta to Arizona, down into Mexico, and from California’s Salton Sea to the streets of Las Vegas and the small town of Carthage, South Dakota, and countless places in between. In the spring of that year, the 24-year-old McCandless had made his way north to Alaska, where he lived in the woods north of Mt. McKinley for 113 days before his death by starvation. In May of 2006, fulfilling a quest fourteen years in the making , I loaded up a backpack and walked out my door here in Concord, Massachusetts, determined to follow in Chris’s footsteps all the way to Fairbanks 142, the abandoned bus where he lived, and died, that summer on Stampede Trail. THE CALL OF THE WILD is a documentary film about this journey.