McCANDLESS FOUND DEAD

"When McCandless turned up dead in Alaska and the perplexing circumstances of his demise were reported in the news media, many people concluded that the boy must have been mentally disturbed" (Krakauer 70).

Assumptions

The people who saw the news and saw that McCandless had died thought he was crazy. People go to that initial assumption because they usually don't know the entire story. They would  base it off the little bit of information they had acquired from the news. If a man hiked Stampede Trail alone, without the proper gear, and not knowing the trail completely, he would be seen as mentally ill. His actions and choices were not justified so people had to fill in the blank themselves. To make that decision is so absurd to the Alaskan people that no "normal" person would do such a thing.