By Kyle Wright
Its yellow has dulled to bronze and its green has deepened to turquoise. Only time and an extended exposure to the elements can produce that kind of patina. The bus is beautiful in its way, a canvas upon which Mother Nature herself has painted. I suppose that’s why its contents strike such a discordant note. That the bus made beautiful would serve as a sarcophagus, a final resting place for discarded gear and dead men’s bones, is an affront to the senses.
Like the corpses littering Mount Everest or the bodies found bobbing along the banks of the Amazon, their backs full of the arrows of indigenous tribes, Bus 142, also known as the Stampede Trail Bus or the Magic Bus or the Into the Wild Bus, holds its own horrors. Or did, anyway. It has since come to symbolize mankind’s insatiable desire for adventure, no matter how dangerous or deadly that adventure might be.
The International Harvester K5 bus rolled off the line in 1946 and was immediately put to work transporting soldiers for the United States government. Later, it transported civilian commuters on behalf of the Fairbanks City Transit System. After the bus’s engine was removed, a bulldozer towed it and two others to a clearing along the Denali Borough’s Stampede Trail to serve as a bunkhouse for the Yutan Construction Company mining crew. It was outfitted with a couple of beds and a wood burning stove. When mining operations were shut down in the 1970s, the two other buses were removed but as Bus 142 had broken a rear axle, it was left behind.
The Tragic Bus
It then served as shelter for hundreds of hikers and hunters. Curious, because the bus didn’t offer much in the way of insulation or protection. The wind whistled right through it, and the bus was about as bear proof as a Styrofoam cooler, but it at least kept the rain off and provided the illusion of safety.
One of those hikers seeking shelter, a young man named Christopher McCandless, crawled into Bus 142 intending to make it his base of operations as he lived off the land. It instead became his coffin. Books were written about McCandless. Movies were made. For those enamored with at-all-costs adventure, the bus turned into a tourist attraction. In so doing, other lives were lost. In 2010, a Swiss woman drowned trying to cross the Teklanika River. Nine years later, a woman from Belarus made the same fatal error. Others had to be rescued along the way, all of them attempting a pilgrimage to the Magic Bus.
As those rescue and retrieval efforts multiplied, government agencies began talking about removing the bus from its resting place and finally, the decision was made to uproot it from its home along the Stampede Trail where it had sat for nearly 60 years and plant it at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. A CH-47 Chinook operated by the Alaska Army National Guard did just that.
Forever Wild
What did that bus see in those 60 years? Looking out of its windshield, the bus bore witness to the best and the worst of Mother Nature’s mood swings, summer’s warm embraces and winter’s cold shoulders. But looking at the reflection in the rearview mirror, the bus witnessed something else entirely. Written on the faces of its passengers were exhilaration and exhaustion. But desperation, too. Resignation, even.
Humanity is so infatuated with adventure that we tell even the tales that end in tragedy. They’re meant to be cautionary, I’m sure, but I’ve caught myself leaning in a little closer when those tragic tales are told and apparently, I’m not alone. Because as soon as enough money is raised, a cover for the bus will be constructed and adventure seekers will be able to visit the Museum of the North and tour Bus 142, the bus painted with Mother Nature’s beauty and vandalized by mankind’s pride.
