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Wilderness is the theme of Sherry Simpson’s second essay collection “The Accidental Explorer.” A resident of Alaska since childhood, Simpson has always lived alongside areas commonly defined as wild and untouched. Yet as she notes in her introduction, what one culture defines as “wilderness,” another (in this case Alaska’s Natives) defines as “home.”

Simpson ponders in these pages whether such a thing as wilderness even exists. The earliest explorers of Alaska were merely following in the footsteps of the aboriginal people who had always lived here. And today’s hikers and backcountry wanderers are ultimately recreating journeys that others have already made.

How then does one approach wilderness? As Simpson puts in her characteristically incisive prose, “the term ‘wilderness’ became so fraught with multiple intentions and cultural significance that handling it reminded me of basic gun safety: be careful where you point it and always assume it’s loaded.”

This point is made best in the essay “A Man Made Cold by the Universe” which tells of a late winter journey Simpson and four companions made out the Stampede Road in Healy to the site of the abandoned bus where Christopher McCandless starved himself into renown.

McCandless has been a polarizing figure ever since his story first broke in 1992. Few people elicit more scorn from Alaskans. Yet his story has resonated with many disaffected Americans. Thanks to Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book “Into the Wild,” McCandless has emerged as something of a messiah for those uncomfortable with mainstream society.

Simpson avoids taking a firm stand on McCandless. She admits to having vacillated between viewing him as a romantic and dismissing him as an idiot. “Mostly,” she says, “I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.”

Simpson and her companions find themselves at the bus — which has now become a Mecca — where they ponder the whole phenomenon. The written remarks of previous visitors, some of which she recounts, are embarrassingly trite.

Just when readers are ready to conclude that yes indeed, the whole thing deserves ridicule, Simpson mentions an Alaskan friend now stranded on the East Coast who told her how numbingly mundane and conformist life in that part of the country is. This makes her a bit more sympathetic toward McCandless.

Simpson uses the moment to recall some of the many who have ventured into Alaska’s wilds and never returned, as well as others who survived with good memories. None of these people became heroes. Ultimately, she concludes, it’s just easy to get killed here. It only takes one mistake.

Those who live, meanwhile, may well mock you for your foolishness, as McCandless is by Simpson’s little group; in one moment of morbid humor, one of her companions poses for a picture alongside the now-famous bus while holding a can of Spam.

The point for Simpson, however, is that the bus should not be the goal of those seeking deeper meaning. McCandless died of ignorance as much as starvation. Don’t make a special trip to the bus, she counsels. Pass it by and see what lies beyond.

I first read this piece years ago, and it remains the most thoughtful meditation on Christopher McCandless I’ve yet encountered. It exemplifies what Simpson is telling us in this book. Wilderness is not what you think. McCandless didn’t die in a dugout hole in the tundra; he starved in an abandoned bus frequented by hunters. Wherever you may go, someone has already beaten you there. There’s no such thing as pristine, untouched wilderness. There’s just lands that remain wild.

McCandless famously didn’t bring a map with him when he wandered off on his fatal journey. And while taking one would have saved his life, Simpson questions the value of maps for really telling us about a place.

In the pair of interconnected essays that close the book, Simpson recounts the experiences of some of the earliest white explorers in Alaska. They, too, didn’t have maps when they set out. Their job was to make them. A map can tell us plenty about an area, but it can’t make us know it. Simpson points out that Europeans attached names of family, sponsors and royalty to various points, but these names don’t do the landscape justice.

Native names for places tended to explain their significance to the difficult job of survival. Hence, when translated, the Native names referred to the “Lake Where Game Trail Goes into the Water,” or “Where We Spend the Spring.” Compared to such descriptions, calling a place, say, Fairbanks seems rather pointless.

Simpson traverses the state seeking a sense of wilderness and her place in it. One particularly touching essay finds her on the Circle-Fairbanks Trail with an aging dog she realizes isn’t able to go the distance. Elsewhere she kayaks in Glacier Bay National Park and more or less retraces James Wickersham’s trek to the base of Denali. A common feature of her excursions seems to be the realization that the experience rarely lives up to the plan, but an epiphany can still be found on the way.

When Simpson is at her best, as she frequently is in this book, it’s easy to argue that she is the finest essayist in Alaska today. Her prose is consistently original, her observations forever insightful. She does get just a bit navel retentive at times, but while this tendency derails a couple of the pieces found here, it doesn’t undermine the book as a whole.

Simpson’s view of Alaska and its fabled wilderness lies somewhere between love and cynicism. She wants to know it, not just live in it. That search sometimes leads her to some impolitic conclusions. To read her, then, is to find new ways of looking at the great backyard we all share.