Stampede Trail
road and trail in Alaska
The Stampede Trail is a road and trail in the Denali Borough in the U.S. state of Alaska near the northern boundary of Denali National Park. Apart from a paved or maintained gravel road for 8 miles (13 km) between Eight Mile Lake and the trail's eastern end, the route consists of a rough trail suitable for hiking or all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) following the path of the original road, which has deteriorated over the years. The route ends at an abandoned antimony mine on Stampede Creek, near Stampede Airport's grass airstrip.
Historically, access to the east end of the trail was gained from the Alaska Railroad. Today, the primary access to the trail is from the George Parks Highway (Alaska Route 3) which opened in the early 1970s. The Parks Highway intersects the trail at milepost 251.1, two miles north of the center of Healy. Though this intersection marks the present-day eastern terminus of the Stampede Road, Lignite Road continues a few miles east from this intersection to the railroad tracks and the Nenana River.
In 1992, the body of Christopher McCandless was found in an abandoned bus deep inside the wilderness about 28 mi (45 km) down the trail. Writer Jon Krakauer investigated McCandless's travels and journey to the bus in an Outside magazine article published in 1993. He later expanded his article into a book, Into the Wild, published in 1996, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 2007.
The public source identifies “Stampede Trail” as road and trail in Alaska. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Stampede, Trail and road.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Stampede Trail”, the useful work is to connect “road and trail in Alaska” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q802513. Authority coordinates are 63.868, -149.769. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1992, 1993, 1996 and 2007.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stampede Trail” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.