>>609405He carried a lot of books. He read Jack London and all that shit, and he had a few survival type books. But he was too much of a romantic. He started out his journey by abandoning his car and burning his cash. He purposely made things difficult for the challenge of it, or so it seems.
At the point he decided to walk out, but could not ford the Teklanika River, He was probably spent, not thinking too clearly, maybe in a semi-starvation mode. Turns out the cable crossing was half a mile downstream from the trail he's on, but it isn't visible from the trail. Krakauer had to bush-crash to get to it. Maybe a map would have made things too easy for McCandless, so he didn't carry one. The book has a Cliff Notes, so you can get a quick summary:
> Ultimately Krakauer seems to believe that McCandless wasn't consumed by existential despair, but driven by meaning and purpose. He distrusted the value of things that came easily. "He demanded much of himself," the author writes, " — more, in the end, than he could deliver."http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/i/into-the-wild/summary-and-analysis/chapter-17 