Twenty-two-year-old Andrew Costales celebrated Thanksgiving Day in a Fairbanks hospital, tending to his frostbitten feet and giving thanks that a marvel of technology and a pair of Alaska State Troopers who saved him from the Into-the-Wild fate of Christopher McCandless in the bitter, 30- to 40-degrees-below-zero cold of the Interior Alaska last week.
"I was an hour away from death,'' he said by telephone from his hospital bed three days after rescue.
Last Saturday, he was pulled from a cold, dark cabin only about 35 miles east of where the body of McCandless in 1992 was discovered inside an abandoned bus.
As the McCandless legend now has it, a quest for the meaning of life led the 23-year-old Virginia man to death by starvation in the shell of the bus in which he'd decided to make his home about 25 miles off the main highway between Alaska's two largest cities -- Anchorage and Fairbanks. McCandless died in large part because he was poorly equipped. Costales survived because he was somewhat better prepared. He carried one, key piece of life-saving gear -- a SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger.
With one push of a button, the SPOT is capable of sending a call for help to a satellite circling the earth. Almost instantly, that message is relayed to rescue authorities along with the coordinates for the person who pushed the button. Costales' SPOT call sent Alaska Troopers Eric Jeffords and James Ellison out on a bad trail on a bitterly cold night on a mission to try to save a recent transplant from Outside, as Alaskans like to call the rest of America.
Jeffords told Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reporter Tim Mowry that troopers were familiar with Costales
because some in the Healy area had worried about the young man's behavior last winter and suggested authorities keep an eye on him. "He chased us off twice when we went out to check on him," Jeffords added. "He said he didn't want anything to do with people and he wanted to be left alone."
Into the great emptiness
McCandless, too, had come to the Healy area wanting to be left alone. Somehow both men were drawn to the same reasonably accessible but little-visited area of Interior Alaska. Not far from where McCandless turned west and went into the wild to die, Costales turned east and went into the wild to, in his words, "just get away.'' There appears, however, to be a fair bit more to his story than that, depending on how much of the story one can believe.
A little background on Costales first.
Born in California, he joined the U.S. Army after getting out of high school. His stay in the structured world of the U.S. military did not last long. After his discharge, he said, he wanted something wholly different from the Army. "I wanted to try something else,'' he said. "I just felt like I wanted to do something new.''
And so he journeyed north to Alaska. This is a somewhat common story. Alaska is America's ultimate start-over state, the grand adventure state, the last America frontier and the last American wilderness all rolled into one. Along with adventure comes the promise and baggage of other frontiers long gone and wildernesses now conquered by civilization. Many young searchers journey north looking for something hard to explain in an almost-mystical land. Most end up searching for a job to support themselves or retreat back to the Lower 48.
Costales, like McCandless, was an exception. Either more courageous or foolish than the majority of new immigrants, the backcountry-inexperienced Costales headed into the wilderness, east up Healy Creek, then over Cody Pass and down into the drainage of the Wood River. He said Tuesday that to stay alive he ate a lot of snowshoe hares, or "rabbits'' as he called them, and flour. As with McCandless, Costales stayed in whatever shelter he could find. "Usually, he ends up using other peoples' cabins'' is the polite way Jeffords put it.
Costales refused to say what he was looking for in the Wood River Mountains. "That should remain classified,'' he said. "I don't want people to know what I found out there.''
Gold in them thar hills?
Some locals in the Healy area do, however, have an idea what Costales was doing. "God told him to go to the Wood River Glacier because there was gold up there,'' said Brent Keith, a Healy big-game guide who hunts the Wood River drainage in the fall. The mineral potential of this corner of the Alaska Range is well documented. "The area east of Healy is one of the most active mineral exploration and production areas in the state,'' according to one report from the state Department of Natural Resources.
Costales was evasive when asked if he was looking for minerals, but he did confess he had come into possession of "a half-ounce of gold" -- only to have it stolen. And this is where Costales' story gets more than a little strange. The gold, he said, and "all my equipment was stolen" by a thief who then tried to poison Costales. The thief's name?
"That's classified, sir,'' said Costales, who sprinkles "sir,'' "yes sir,'' "no sir,'' and "thank the Lord'' liberally into his answers to questions. The story he tells from here on sounds a little like the now-popular Discovery channel television reality show "Gold Rush Alaska'' gone off the tracks.
A month after being poisoned, Costales said, he decided to try to hike about 50 miles from the Wood River back to the Parks Highway for help because he didn't think rescuers could get to him where he was camped.
"Do you know how hard it is to get out there (to the Wood River)?'' he asked. "It's extremely difficult for a rescue team to get in."
The area is, indeed, remote by normal American standards, but the elite, highly-trained men who serve with the Alaska Air National Guard's 212th Rescue Squadron regularly pull people out of far more remote and difficult places. Possibly, Costales didn't know of the famed pararescuemen.
Less clear is why he didn't seek shelter at the abandoned Denali Wilderness Lodge when he got in trouble. Costales said he was camped in a homemade "cabin,'' actually more of a makeshift shack, about a mile and a half from the lodge, which he knew about. When asked why he didn't go there, he at first said it was "wrecked.'' Though deserted this time of year, the main lodge and the many outbuildings remain in serviceable condition and would provide shelter in an emergency. After that was pointed out to Costales, he offered the explanation about how hard it was to get rescued from the lodge.
"My original plan was to go back before snowfall,'' he added, but that plan fell apart after he was poisoned. "I was basically in my sleeping bag for a month,'' Costales said. He did not know how much weight he lost in this time. He said he had not gotten on a scale at the Fairbanks hospital. He does not, however, appear emaciated in a photo that ran in the News-Miner. He cannot explain why the unidentified man he believes tried to poison him didn't come kill him in camp and finish the job while Costales was in his weakened state in the sleeping bag.
"It really wasn't much of a cabin,'' he admitted. He described his lodging as something of a "half-log'' structure made of "driftwood and fallen trees. It doesn't look that wonderful, but I was hoping it would serve me for the winter.'' The latter statement, of course, contradicts the earlier claim that Costales planned to get out of the area before snowfall. Costales said his whole story will make more sense after he files a police report about his poisoning and "gets that situation taken care of.''
Poisoned and left for dead?
As to the specifics of the poisoning, Costales says this:
He met a man and his wife who lived out along the Wood River. They impressed him as decent folks. "He seemed like a really nice guy,'' Costales said. Costales thought the couple were his friends, but the man turned out be anything but. One day, Costales said he spied the man cleaning out Costales' camp. The man saw Costales and chased him back into the woods. Costales got away. He said he feared he was about to be killed. Later he returned to his camp.
Everything was gone but some of Costales' flour and syrup. He was hungry, so he made pancakes, pouring the syrup in a cup and dipped in the pancakes. "Sugar in the wilderness, that's like paradise,'' he said. He ate heartily. "I didn't notice anything (odd) at first,'' he added.
But before long, he noticed the syrup tasted sort of like it "had hair in it." He investigated and "found a rat in the cup.'' Alaska has no rats. It was more likely a vole or mouse. Whatever, Costales said he is glad he found it. "I'm lucky I stopped eating,'' he said.
This is because shortly after he stopped, "the symptoms'' started -- his eyes burned; he got sick to his stomach; he felt weak. He stayed this way for a month. He has no idea what he was poisoned with. "I'm not a poison expert,'' he said, but he did save the syrup container and plans to have it tested. The hospital, he said, has not taken bood samples to try to determine if he still has poison in his system.
After the poisoning, according to the rest of Costales story, he got in his sleeping bag and pretty much stayed there until he decided he needed to get out of the country. This tale is strangely reminiscent of that once told of McCandless. In his best-selling book "Into the Wild,'' John Krakauer theorized McCandless's death was the result of his accidentally poisoning and incapacitating himself by eating wild plants. The theory was later debunked, but McCandless, like Costales, did crawl into a sleeping bag for a long time. His body was found there.
Costales said he understood he had to get out of his sleeping bag and leave his camp no matter how sick he felt, or he, too, might die there. Costales has little idea why his unidentified acquaintance would try to poison him.
"It's pretty crazy out there,'' he said. "I don't know why he did it. We didn't have too many words,'' which sort of leaves one wondering a bit about how Costales formed his earlier opinion that the man "seemed like a really nice guy.''
Maybe, Costales offered, the guy was worried Costales would report the theft of his gear to the authorities. "I'm pretty sure he didn't want a witness,'' Costales said, who then claimed the unidentified man stole "thousands of dollars worth of equipment.'' Thousands of dollars? "Over a period of time, I've lost all these things," Costales said. "I've been robbed more than once. Mostly food, gear, most of my winter gear, snowshoes, bunny boots, crampons, ice hammers....(and) my half ounce of gold.''
How Costales would have moved all this gear tens of miles into the Wood River drainage is unclear. Keith said Costales tried to make it into the area by snowmachine last winter, but the snowmachine broke down well short of Cody Pass. Eventually, it appears Costales hiked in and was apparently living in the Denali Wilderness Lodge he described as "wrecked.'' The pilot of a Healy area air taxi met Costales on the runway near the lodge this summer. Costales tried to to beg a ride back to civilization. The pilot got nervous about the man's behavior and turned him down.
Dog musher John Hoegberg of Fairbanks, who leads horse-packing trips into the area in the summer and fall, said he heard about Costales but never saw him. Hoegberg did stop by the Denali lodge on one trip this year, and "it was kind of creepy,'' he said. The place was vacant, but it was clear someone had been living there.
Nobody is known to be over-wintering in the drainage this year, added Keith, who runs a trapline back into the country. There are a couple of guides who use the area in the fall, said Hoegberg, but they're gone for the winter. Costales, when told that his story about the poisoning was hard to believe, laughed nervously (as he did repeatedly throughout an interview) and stuck by it all as true: The theft, the poisoning, a marathon hike, frozen feet, death at the door, and finally the SPOT call for help and rescue.
Hike toward safety
Costales might have made it out on his own, he said, but "I fell in a creek, and I froze my feet."
He kept walking after that until he got to a cabin. He started a fire, but the cabin "didn't hold heat,'' he said. Squirrels had chewed out the plastic over the windows, and there were only about 20 sticks -- or "little, tiny logs'' as Costales called them -- in the firebox. "Spruce,'' he said.
"Little tiny logs'' weren't enough to heat the cabin, but Costales burned them. He also tried to care for his feet. "I took my shoes off because my feet were wet, and I couldn't put my shoes back on,'' he said. Frostbitten toes once rewarmed become excruciatingly painful. In a survival situation, the accepted practice is to leave boots on frozen feet and keep hiking until help is found. An emotionally troubled Anchorage runner who appears to have wandered for days in extreme cold and snow earlier this month froze his feet so badly they eventually needed to be amputated. But before that became necessary, he was still able to walk into a local hotel and ask for help after searchers had given up hope he'd ever be found alive.
Costales, on the other hand, was helpless once he took his shoes off. That was when he knew he had to use the SPOT. "I would have died,'' he said. "I was starting to go to sleep.''
Salvation arrived not long after he pushed the SPOT's SOS button. The sound of snowmachines shattered the silence. "I'm extremely lucky,'' Costales said, "and I thank the Lord.''
Lord dispatches Alaska State Troopers
"I heard (the trooper) snowmobiles,'' Costales said. "They got stuck in the creek. I heard them trying to get out. I yelled to them I couldn't come out (of the cabin) because my feet were frozen.'' Once the troopers got the snowmachine out of the creek -- snowmachining conditions are abysmal in the Healy area with only five or six inches of snow on the ground and still a lot of open water despite an unseasonable bout of extreme cold -- they wrapped Costales' frozen feet, loaded him in a sled, and "told me to hang on for dear life."
Costales and the troopers made it to the highway to be met by EMTs who performed emergency treatment and arranged to have Costales transported to the Fairbanks hospital. Costales is there, worried he could lose three toes on his left foot to frostbite. Troopers say he has yet to file an official police report about the poisoning. Many agree the story he tells raises a lot of questions.
But Costales does make two solid observations about what happened to him. One has to do with how he got into so much trouble on his hike back to civilization. It was, he said, "the overall weather conditions of Alaska.'' These can never be underestimated. The University of Alaska Anchorage cross-country athlete who went walking in snow and cold for days earlier this month would still have his feet if he'd been wandering back home in his native Kenya. But Alaska's cold is unforgiving.
The people of the north, fortunately, tend toward the opposite. Many put themselves in discomfort, even danger, to come to the aid of their fellow man. It happened again in Costales' case.
"Those troopers are heroes,'' Costales said.
Thanks to their efforts, this time help arrived in time. This time there will be no best-selling book or popular movie about a young man who went Into the Wild and died.
Contact Craig Medred at craig@alaskadispatch.com