“. . . as to when I revisit civilization, it will not be soon. I have not tired of the wilderness . . .” Everett Ruess, in a letter to his brother, 1934.
It was an easy place to disappear, I figured. The year was some decades past the wanderings of the young poet/artist/dream-seeker Everett Ruess, and I was then only casually aware of his name, not at all steeped in the mystique of his disappearance, the pathos of his family’s long search for answers, the occasional controversies following yet another claim of his body found at last. I just needed a little people-free space, to work out some life quandaries now mostly fragmented into memories. The SE Utah canyon country was not yet promoted and exploited into the pro/anti-extraction/tourism battleground it has become in this century, so my mid-winter trip had been pretty easy to plan and carry out, until the storm caught us.
Supplied with canned food for me and a bag of kibble for Willow dog, my trail partner of that time, I’d driven my old ‘71 Chevy PU from paved onto dirt road, from there taking a seldom-used two-track trail toward a line of cliffs. As usual in those days, I towed an old car for use as a shuttle for my jaunts, and my only posted itinerary was a phone message to a family member that I was headed into canyon country and would call when I came out (and here I suppose the caveat to “never hike alone, carry a GPS tracker, and always let someone know where to find you,” should be inserted in all CAPS), so when the rain became snow I should have turned back toward pavement. Instead, I had locked the towed car’s steering wheel to stop it from sliding sideways in the slushy tracks, and drove on until I found a camp on the edge of a canyon overlooking more canyons to the horizon. The snow lasted till morning, then turned to rain, then to snow again. We would be here for awhile.
This much we now know. Everett Ruess began his life journey in Southern California in 1914, and by the early 1930s had expanded his horizons into California’s Sierra Nevada and the red rock canyons of southern Utah and northern Arizona. On November 12, 1934, he left Escalante, Utah to explore canyons to the south and east, and never returned. According to a sheepherder, Ruess was near the junction of the Escalante and Colorado River by November 19, 1934. During an initial search in early 1935, his burros, along with the remains of a campsite and the inscription “NEMO 1934” were found in a nearby canyon. In 1957, as Glen Canyon approached its watery future and people began exploring its canyons and mysteries with more urgency, some camping equipment was found in a cave not far away. Some thought it was evidence of the disappeared dreamer’s fate, while others disagreed, and this pattern of discovery and debate continues. There are several books and many articles devoted to his early life, his disappearance, the long search, and discoveries of bodies that either are (or are not) the earthly remains of Everett Ruess. I’ll link to further research sources below, but for now it’s enough to say that his mystery still travels in canyon shadows.
From my vantage point decades beyond the quandaries I was considering in my snowed-in camp above a canyon near Everett Ruess’s last known travels, it’s easy to understand the confusion of a family left with too many questions, not enough answers. I’ve held and been gripped by grief, tried to find and accept words of comfort, sought in desperation for that elusive feeling (described as ‘closure’ by experts in the business of grief recovery) which allows us to assign loss and trauma to memory, to turn toward other survivors with enthusiasm and hope. I also understand a desire to solve mysteries, to find the bodies wherever they’re buried and assign cause and blame as deserved, but in some cases it’s best to explore a shadow without attempting to reveal all its secrets. For me, much of the canyon country falls into this category, even as our society goes about the contentious business of defining just which areas should be preserved, conserved, developed, exploited — and as each of us decides just where we stand on the continuum from one to another extreme position.
Everett Ruess’s poems, drawings and journals have gained an underground following among several generations of canyon-affected dreamers, loners, and mystics of various beliefs and levels of accomplishment and ambition. Writers as diverse in perspective as Wallace Stegner, W. L. Rusho, Edward Abbey, Gibbs M. Smith, Jon Krakauer, and Philip L. Fradkin have found his story compelling. Dorothea Lange photographed him in 1933, French film-maker Emmanuel Tellier released Le Disparition d’Everett Ruess in 2018, and songwriter/singer Dave Alvin’s “Everett Ruess,” from his album Ash Grove (2004) best encapsulates for me the mystery that remains, and which draws some members of every generation to seek wild places, peopled only with our own desires, griefs, and memories, among the shadows of seekers who’ve passed before us.
As happens with winter storms in canyon country, the snow eventually tapered into sunny days and nightly freeze-ups, so human and dog could foray along canyon rims and the hills between, breaking snowy trails that became muddy tracks that froze each night, exploring hoodoo outcroppings and impossibly tilted slopes studded with lava and petrified wood boulders, peering into still shadowed depths that neither of us felt ready to probe, just yet. At last the snowdrifts blocking the two-track ruts we’d followed coming in started melting out, and early one morning, in the hours before the ruts thawed to mud once again, we felt ready to make our way toward paved roads and a telephone booth, shuttle car in tow. My loyal camp partner hadn’t seen another human for about a month now, and though she was a meek dog when it came to confrontation, she offered up a low, guttural growl of warning when the first human came into sight, then wagged her stubby tail. I understood her range of feelings, and stroked her head in comfort.
I’ll leave you with a passage from Everett Ruess’s Wilderness Song, and with a recommendation to read more of his poetry (available in the book Everett Ruess, a Vagabond For Beauty, W. L. Rusho [Peregrine Smith Books, 1983]):
“Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary:
That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun;
Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange disease;
Lonely and wet and cold, but that I kept my dream!”
Some links to more about Everett Ruess follow, and feel free to share your own canyon country thoughts and experiences by clicking the Comments link below. Up next, “This Sort of Drudgery…”, W. H. Holmes and the Art of Geology — until then, take care of yourself and help somebody else along the way - B.
An interesting biographical sketch of his early life and personal values, “The Dream of Everett Ruess.”
Salt Lake Magazine (2019) story about some of his admirers and biographers, along with a history.
A list of books featuring Everett Ruess.
Some journal entries, from Wilderness Journals of Everett Ruess, Gibbs-Smith, 1998