The story of Everett Ruess, whose disappearance in canyon country became one of the most compelling legends of desert exploration.
If you've spent any time in Escalante country, you've heard the Everett Ruess story. Twenty-year-old kid from Los Angeles, obsessed with the desert, vanishes into the canyons south of Escalante in 1934 with two burros and a pocket notebook. The burros turn up. The kid never does. And the legend of Everett Ruess has been a small, specific religion among canyon wanderers ever since. David Roberts's book is the one that tries to separate the person from the myth, and it's the book you should actually read if you care about either.
Roberts is a climber, a writer, and a researcher with the patience to spend years chasing down the evidence — letters, journals, trail logs, interviews with old-timers in remote Utah towns, eventually a forensic investigation into bone fragments that got fingered, briefly, as possibly Everett's. The book moves between biography and detective story, and Roberts is honest about when the trail goes cold. He doesn't manufacture a resolution. What he does is pull the real Everett out of the smoke — a gifted young writer and artist, yes, and also a kid who was harder on his family than the legend lets on, who made some genuinely reckless decisions, and whose disappearance had more possible explanations than the romantic one.
I hand this book to people the first time they camp in the Escalante, because the myth is thick down there and it's useful to have the real version in your head. Everett the canyon mystic, the one whose last letter signed off with Nemo, is a better campfire story if you also know about Everett the difficult son, Everett the provocative homesexual letter-writer, Everett the naive kid from California who probably, most likely, just fell. The two versions don't cancel each other out. They make the story bigger.
The book is also a quiet meditation on why young people disappear into deserts. Roberts has spent his life around that impulse. He takes it seriously as a psychology without either sentimentalizing it or clinically flattening it. By the end you understand not just what happened to Everett Ruess, as far as anyone can, but why any of us are still telling the story eighty-plus years later. The canyon holds onto him because it holds onto that version of young wilderness hunger — the kind that feels, on certain afternoons in certain washes, like a thing still alive in the rock.
Read it before you solo in Escalante. Carry a notebook. Keep the burros tied up better than he did.
