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As one of only three official state repositories in Alaska, and the only one in the interior, the museum has the staff and the experience to properly care for artifacts like the bus, and unlike other potential candidates, it planned to exhibit the bus to the public for free.
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Sign up for Outside+ today and get access to all of Backpacker’s and our other publications’ best stories, plus other great perks.įor the Museum of the North, Linn says, pushing for the opportunity to exhibit Bus 142 just made sense. It’s a big world out there-and Backpacker wants to help you explore it. Some weren’t prepared for the harsh conditions of the Alaskan backcountry: After a spate of frostbite injuries and near-drownings on the trail, as well as two deaths, the state finally decided it was time for the old bus to go.
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In the years after Into the Wild ’s publication and the release of a 2007 film version starring Emile Hirsch, the bus became a destination for fans who wanted to retrace McCandless’s footsteps. Over the coming decades, the bus would become an area landmark, serving as a shelter for moose hunters and backcountry travelers. “The other men of the camp lived in two orange buses, one was the cookhouse and one the bunkhouse.”Īfter work on the project ended, the company left Bus 142, now with a broken axle, behind. “Dad named Bus 142 our ‘boudoir’ and another was our ‘galley,’ which was outfitted with a cook stove and table,” Hines wrote. Hines, who’s consulting with the museum on the exhibit, called it “a summer of wonderful adventure in the middle of the wilderness.” In a post published by the non-profit Friends of Bus 142, Mickey Mariner Hines recalled living in the bus as a 10-year-old in 1961 while her father worked on the project. In 1961, the Yutan Construction Company purchased Bus 142, removed the engine, and used a bulldozer to drag it and three other buses out along what’s now the Stampede Trail as temporary housing for its workers, who were building an access road between the Alaska Railroad and a nearby mine. Long before McCandless’s final journey into the wild, the Magic Bus was just Bus 142, a 1946 International Harvester K-5 that carted passengers around Fairbanks as part of the city’s municipal transit system. “It’s not just bringing it in, plunking it down, and allowing people to come to it.” The bus is now at the museum as conservators prepare it for exhibit. “The big thing right now is trying to help the community and the public understand the long process that it takes to put something like this on exhibit,” says Angela Linn, the museum’s senior collections manager. There, staff set to work, assessing the damage to the dilapidated vehicle and figuring out what it would take to transform it into a museum piece that would tell the story of a brief, unusual chapter in Alaskan history. Following a stint in storage, it made its way to its final resting place at the Museum of the North, a University of Alaska-affiliated institution in Fairbanks. After the helicopter landed, a crew loaded the bus onto a waiting flatbed truck. However, the final flight of the Magic Bus was just the beginning of a much longer journey for a group of curators, students, and skilled volunteers. For a certain kind of questing hiker–and a state government tired of rescuing them when they came unprepared or the swollen Teklanika River trapped them–it was the end of an era. Since the publication of John Krakauer’s 1996 book Into the Wild, the dilapidated automobile had drawn thousands of hikers, who made the pilgrimage down the Stampede Trail to see the site where Christopher McCandless, the book’s star-crossed main character, had spent the last three-and-a-half months of his life before starvation put an end to his peripatetic adventures. When a National Guard Chinook helicopter airlifted the Magic Bus out of the Alaskan backcountry last year, the news got more attention from backpackers and the public at large than the demise of an old bus usually does.
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