Into the Wild Trivia
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98 free Into the Wild trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Into the Wild is the rare true story that people argue about decades later. In 1990 a new graduate gave away his savings, cut off his family and spent two years drifting across the American West under an invented name, before heading into the Alaskan bush with a small pack and a paperback or two. Jon Krakauer turned the story into a book that sat on the bestseller lists for two years, and Sean Penn spent a decade chasing the rights to film it. These 98 questions cover all of it: the road years and the strangers who fed, housed and tried to stop Chris McCandless; the bus on the Stampede Trail and what became of it; the shifting theories about how he died; the book's structure and the other wanderers Krakauer sets beside him; and the 2007 film, its cast and the Eddie Vedder soundtrack. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something you did not know. Play it if you have read the book for school or seen the film more than once, or print it for a book-club night.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01McCandless gave the roughly $24,000 left in his college fund after Emory to which charity?
Oxfam
Oxfam got all of it, a college fund of more than $24,000, and McCandless then lived as a drifter, taking work as a farm-hand or restaurant food preparer only when he had to.
Q 02McCandless, who abandoned his car and burned his cash, travelled under which alias?
Alexander Supertramp
Alexander Supertramp, usually shortened to 'Alex', was all most people he met knew, so his body went unidentified until an old employer dug out a tax form he had filled in with his real details.
Q 03A flash flood disabled McCandless's Datsun, and he abandoned the car beside which desert reservoir?
Lake Mead
Lake Mead rangers came across the abandoned Datsun a few months later and got it running again, and it was then put to work as an undercover vehicle.
Q 04In Penn's film, McCandless leaves Carthage after his boss Wayne Westerberg is arrested for what?
Satellite piracy
Satellite piracy puts Westerberg behind bars in the film, so McCandless moves on and takes a kayak down the Colorado River, ignoring the rangers who tell him he needs a permit.
Q 05Shooting which animal did McCandless call 'one of the greatest tragedies of my life' in his journal?
A moose
A moose, shot on June 9, 1992, fed him for only a few days: he failed to preserve the meat, it spoiled, and he wrote 'I now wish I had never shot the moose.'
Q 06Where did bus 142, McCandless's Stampede Trail refuge, find a permanent home in September 2020?
The University of Alaska museum
The University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks was named its permanent home on September 24, 2020, and is conserving the bus for outdoor display; the one seen in the 2007 film was a replica.
Q 07Which actor plays Chris McCandless in Sean Penn's 2007 film of Into the Wild?
Emile Hirsch
Emile Hirsch lost 40 pounds to play the starving final weeks, and Roger Ebert called his performance 'hypnotic', adding: 'It is great acting, and more than acting.'
Q 08Which Eddie Vedder song from Into the Wild won the 2008 Golden Globe for Best Original Song?
Guaranteed
'Guaranteed' closes the soundtrack album, and Vedder has said its lines about the one person who might have kept the wanderer at home were written for McCandless's sister, Carine.
Q 09McCandless's last self-portrait shows him waving and holding a note that opens with which words?
I have had a happy life
I have had a happy life and thank the Lord, the farewell note reads; a second note, taped to the bus door, had begged anyone passing for help, saying he was near death and too weak to hike out.
Q 10Which actress plays Tracy Tatro, the teenage singer whose advances McCandless gently turns down?
Kristen Stewart
Kristen Stewart took the small part the year before Twilight made her famous, and in the film McCandless declines Tracy's advances because she is still a minor.
Q 11McCandless walked onto the Stampede Trail with a ten-pound bag of which staple?
Rice
Rice, a .22 rifle with a few boxes of rounds, a camera and a guidebook to the region's edible plants were about all he carried, and the electrician who dropped him off tried hard to talk him out of going.
Q 12Which electrician, the last to see McCandless alive, drove him from Fairbanks to the trailhead?
Jim Gallien
Jim Gallien gave him the lift on April 28, 1992, saw the light pack and meagre rations, and offered to detour to Anchorage to buy him proper gear; McCandless declined.
Q 13Why did Alaska's agencies remove the Stampede Trail bus in June 2020?
Hikers kept dying or needing rescue
Q 21Which actor earned an Oscar nomination at 82 as Ron Franz, the widower who befriends McCandless?
Hal Holbrook
Hal Holbrook, known for decades for the one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!, plays the lonely widower who teaches McCandless leatherwork; together they tool a belt that records the young man's travels.
Q 22What does Ron Franz, the widowed leather worker, offer as McCandless sets off for Alaska?
Adopt him as his grandchild
Adopt him as his grandchild is the offer from a man who lost his family in a car accident while serving in the army, and Franz hands over his old camping gear as well.
Q 23Which actress plays Carine McCandless, Chris's younger sister, in Penn's film?
Hikers kept dying or needing rescue at the river crossing on the way in, at least 15 rescues and two drownings, so an Alaska Army National Guard training mission flew the bus out.
Q 14Which Army helicopter carried the Stampede Trail bus out to Healy in June 2020?
CH-47 Chinook
A CH-47 Chinook lifted the 1946 bus out on a National Guard training mission and set it down in Healy, and the state then kept it at an undisclosed secure site while it decided where the relic should go.
Q 15Who discovered McCandless's body inside the Stampede Trail bus on September 6, 1992?
Hunters
Hunters found the body, with a plea for help taped to the bus door, about nineteen days after his death; it weighed 67 pounds, and the coroner gave the probable cause as starvation.
Q 16What did McCandless's July 30 journal entry, beginning 'Extremely Weak', blame for his decline?
Wild potato seeds
Wild potato seeds, from the plant Hedysarum alpinum, became the centre of Krakauer's theories, which shifted from a look-alike sweet pea to a mould to a measured toxin over two decades.
Q 17Krakauer's 2015 study found what kind of toxin in the Hedysarum alpinum McCandless ate?
Amino acid
Amino acid: the lab found L-canavanine, an antimetabolite toxic to mammals. Krakauer had missed it for years because he, like earlier testers, had been looking for a toxic alkaloid.
Q 18McCandless's diet of very lean game risked 'rabbit starvation', a form of what?
Protein poisoning
Protein poisoning sets in when nearly all of a diet's calories come from lean meat: with no fat to burn, the body is overloaded with protein and wastes away even on a full stomach.
Q 19Which river, swollen by snowmelt each summer, does Krakauer's book call McCandless's 'Rubicon'?
Teklanika
The Teklanika had been an easy crossing when he walked in that April; by July it was too deep and fast to ford, so he turned back to the bus, where he died the following month.
Q 20Which actress plays Jan Burres, half of the hippie couple who twice take in McCandless?
Catherine Keener
Catherine Keener's Jan is drifting apart from her partner Rainey when the pair pick McCandless up, and his company helps them rekindle things before they meet him again in the desert that December.
Jena Malone
Jena Malone, who had acted opposite the film's leading man five years earlier in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, plays the sister he is close to and yet leaves without a word about his plans.
Q 24Which Wedding Crashers star plays Wayne Westerberg, the South Dakota boss who gives McCandless work?
Vince Vaughn
Vince Vaughn's Westerberg gives the drifter a job in Carthage and something like a home, until the boss's own arrest cuts the stay short and sends McCandless back on the road.
Q 25Brian Dierker, who plays Rainey with no acting experience, joined the production to do what job?
Guide the rafting
Guide the rafting scenes was the plan, until Penn cast the river guide himself as Rainey, a major supporting role as Jan Burres's partner.
Q 26Leonard Knight plays himself in Penn's Into the Wild, showing McCandless round which folk-art landmark near the Salton Sea?
Salvation Mountain
Salvation Mountain was Knight's second try: the first collapsed after a rainstorm in 1989, so he began again in adobe and donated paint and kept working on it for almost thirty years.
Q 27Alongside a supporting-actor nomination, Into the Wild's second Oscar nomination was for what?
Film Editing
Film Editing was the other nomination, for Jay Cassidy, but he lost to The Bourne Ultimatum, and with its acting nominee beaten too the film left the 80th Academy Awards empty-handed.
Q 28Which song on Vedder's Into the Wild soundtrack is a cover of a 1989 single by the Canadian act Indio?
Hard Sun
Hard Sun was the one hit of Gordon Peterson, who made a single album as Indio and then walked away from the business; he later sued over Vedder's altered lyrics, and the suits were dropped.
Q 29Which Into the Wild soundtrack song does Vedder perform with its guest guitarist and singer, Jerry Hannan?
Society
Society was not Vedder's own: Hannan wrote it, one of only two songs on the album from another writer, and joined him in the studio to play guitar and sing the backing vocals.
Q 30As Penn's film ends, what does Carine McCandless carry home to Virginia in her backpack?
Her brother's ashes
Her brother's ashes go home in Carine's backpack as the film closes; moments earlier the dying Chris imagines running back to his family, a reunion that never happens.