Finding Everett Ruess Read online

  Finding Everett Ruess

  ALSO BY DAVID ROBERTS

  The Mountain of My Fear

  Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative

  Great Exploration Hoaxes

  Moments of Doubt

  Jean Stafford: A Biography

  Iceland: Land of the Sagas (with Jon Krakauer)

  Mount McKinley: The Conquest of Denali

  (with Bradford Washburn)

  Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache Wars

  In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest

  Escape Routes

  The Lost Explorer: Finding Mallory on Mount Everest

  (with Conrad Anker)

  A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, and the Claiming of the American West

  True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna

  Escape from Lucania: An Epic Story of Survival

  Four Against the Arctic: Shipwrecked for Six Years at the Top of the World

  The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion That Drove the Spaniards Out of the Southwest

  On the Ridge Between Life and Death:

  A Climbing Life Reexamined

  Sandstone Spine: Seeking the Anasazi on the First Traverse of the Comb Ridge

  No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World’s 14 Highest Peaks (with Ed Viesturs)

  Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy

  The Last of His Kind: The Life and Adventures of Bradford Washburn, America’s Boldest Mountaineer

  K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain (with Ed Viesturs)

  Copyright © 2011 by David Roberts

  Foreword copyright © 2011 by Jon Krakauer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  BROADWAY BOOKS and the Broadway Books colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, for permission to reprint text from the Ruess Family Papers; excerpts from letters, diaries, and essays by Everett Ruess; excerpts from correspondence, essays, and diary notations by Christopher, Stella, and Waldo Ruess; and excerpts of correspondence from others to the Ruesses.

  Grateful acknowledgment also to Michèle Ruess, for permission to quote from diaries, essays, and letters belonging to the Ruess family.

  The Utah State Historical Society kindly granted permission to quote from the papers of Harry LeRoy Aleson.

  The blockprints at the head of each chapter are reproduced from originals by Everett Ruess.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Roberts, David.

  Finding Everett Ruess/David Roberts.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Ruess, Everett, b. 1914. 2. Poets, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3535.U26Z78 2011

  811′.52—dc22

  [B] 2011008379

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59178-4

  Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

  Jacket design by David Tran

  Front cover photograph courtesy of

  the University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott Library,

  Special Collections Department

  v3.1

  To the memory of Stella, Christopher, and Waldo Ruess—

  Who loved Everett without qualification,

  And who spent the rest of their days keeping his flame alive

  Wherever poets, adventurers and wanderers of the Southwest gather, the story of Everett Ruess will be told. His name, like woodsmoke, conjures far horizons.

  —Hugh Lacy, 1938

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Jon Krakauer

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Prologue

  PART ONE: THE DESIRE TO LIVE

  One: “I Have Given the Wind My Pledge”

  Two: “I Have Been One Who Loved the Wilderness”

  Three: “The Crazy Man Is in Solitude Again”

  Four: “I Go to Make My Destiny”

  Five: “I Have Seen More Beauty Than I Can Bear”

  Photo Insert 1

  PART TWO: SAY THAT I KEPT MY DREAM

  Six: Nemo

  Seven: Desert Trails

  Eight: Cult and Conundrum

  Nine: “No Least Desire for Fame”

  Photo Insert 2

  PART THREE: WHAT ANETH SAW

  Ten: Jackass Bar

  Eleven: Comb Ridge

  Epilogue: Happy Journeys

  Acknowledgments

  Note on Sources

  About the Author

  FOREWORD BY

  JON KRAKAUER

  In the spring of 1992, a twenty-four-year-old man from suburban Washington, D.C., seeking self-knowledge and a meaningful challenge, hitchhiked to Alaska and walked into the wilderness to live off the land. His name was Chris McCandless. As one of his last acts before heading into the bush alone, he mailed a postcard to a friend that cheerfully declared,

  Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne.… Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.

  Four months later, when McCandless’s emaciated remains were discovered by moose hunters near the northern boundary of Denali National Park, Outside magazine assigned me to write an article about the tragedy, which I subsequently expanded into a book that was published in 1996 as Into the Wild. In the summer of 1993, while immersed in the research for the book, I was chatting about the project with David Roberts when he remarked, “You know, McCandless sounds a lot like Everett Ruess …”

  “Uh, who’s Everett Ruess?” I sheepishly inquired. Appalled at my ignorance, Roberts commanded me to get my hands on a copy of Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, a collection of Ruess’s letters and diary entries edited by W. L. Rusho, which had been published ten years earlier. As soon as I hung up the phone, I hurried out to my local bookstore and bought a copy, then stayed up the rest of the night reading it. By the time the sun came up I realized that Roberts was absolutely right: A number of the parallels between Ruess and McCandless were extraordinary.

  Ruess disappeared in 1934, at the age of twenty, while on a solo trek through the red-rock canyon country of southern Utah—at the time a daunting expanse of wilderness imbued with a mystique comparable to that of present-day Alaska. Like McCandless, he was an idealist and a romantic. Both men felt a passionate attraction to risky endeavors in untrammeled landscapes. Here, for example, are two sentences from a postcard McCandless wrote while paddling alone down the Colorado River, sixteen months before embarking on his fatal Alaskan adventure:

  I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up.

  And here are a couple of lines from a letter Ruess sent in November 1934, shortly before he vanished without a trace:

  As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time.

  The uncanny resonance between these and other bits of writing by the two young adventurers was so arresting that a week after learning about Ruess from Roberts, I drove 1,200
miles from my home in Seattle to the headwaters of an obscure ravine called Davis Gulch, the site of Ruess’s last known camp. For most of its four-mile length, as I later described the defile in Into the Wild, it

  exists as a deep, twisting gash in the slickrock, narrow enough in places to spit across, lined by overhanging sandstone walls that bar access to the canyon floor.… The country surrounding Davis Gulch is a desiccated expanse of bald rock and brick-red sand. Vegetation is lean. Shade from the withering sun is virtually non-existent. To descend into the confines of the canyon, however, is to arrive in another world. Cottonwoods lean gracefully over drifts of flowering prickly pear. Tall grasses sway in the breeze. The ephemeral bloom of a sego lily peeks from the toe of a ninety-foot stone arch, and canyon wrens call back and forth in plaintive tones from a thatch of scrub oak. High above the creek a spring seeps from the cliff face, irrigating a growth of moss and maidenhair fern that hangs from the rock in lush green mats.

  Standing on the canyon floor, pondering the precise spot where Ruess cooked his beans and grazed his burros and slept under the stars, I hoped to divine something from the particulars of the setting—some clue about his essence—that would by extension shed some light, however obliquely, on McCandless. I was not disappointed. My visit to Davis Gulch motivated me to learn as much as I could about Ruess, and ultimately led me to include a chapter describing his abbreviated life and baffling disappearance in Into the Wild.

  At the time, the best source of published information was Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty. Now, twenty-eight years after the publication of Rusho’s compilation, David Roberts has written the first comprehensive biography of Ruess. An irresistible read, Finding Everett Ruess is a remarkable book, the best thing Roberts has ever written. Although he doesn’t claim to solve the riddle of his subject’s death, Roberts presents an abundance of provocative new evidence that makes the mystery of Ruess’s evanescent existence more compelling than ever.

  Anyone who was intrigued by the story of Chris McCandless is likely to find Finding Everett Ruess utterly fascinating.

  Jon Krakauer

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The title of this book carries a deliberate double meaning. Since 1998, when I first visited the Escalante country in a concerted effort to see if there was anything new that could be learned about the fate of Everett Ruess, I have cherished the hope that the passionate wilderness wanderer who disappeared so enigmatically in 1934, at the age of twenty, might actually be found. Or if the remains of his body could not be discovered, that enough clues could be ferreted out of the desert and the canyons so that we might be able to determine just how and where the young man met his untimely end.

  I was hardly alone in that quest. During the more than seven decades that have elapsed since Everett vanished, all kinds of dedicated sleuths (and not a few mystical wackos) have made it a personal goal to solve the riddle of the vagabond’s disappearance. The cult of Everett Ruess, which has steadily grown over the years, centers on that riddle. Every devotee who responds to the romantic intensity of Everett’s writing or the visionary rapture of his paintings and blockprints wants to know what happened to him after he headed into Davis Gulch in November 1934.

  Yet at the same time, steeping myself in the writings and artwork served another purpose, which was to “find” Everett Ruess in the maze of his moods and contradictions. What made him tick? What was he ultimately after? Why did he need such unrelenting solo adventures in the wilderness to test himself? And if he had a goal beyond endless wandering, how close did he come to fulfilling it?

  Then, for more than a year, between the summer of 2008 and the autumn of 2009, along with a small group of friends and associates in southeastern Utah, I thought that we might have actually found Everett’s body, wedged awkwardly inside a rock crevice in the sandstone monocline of the Comb Ridge. The ins and outs and ups and downs of that bizarre discovery and its aftermath took all of us on an extended emotional roller-coaster ride, and provoked a public response reaching as far as Russia and Japan.

  It may be that the mystery of Everett’s disappearance will never be solved. But thanks to the controversy that swirled around Comb Ridge, we have more hints and clues about the wanderer’s fate—and about his character—than we have ever had before. In that sense, Finding Everett Ruess may form the appropriate rubric for a collective quest to solve a riddle that has no parallel in the history of the American West.

  The first page of a letter from Everett Ruess to his brother, Waldo, the last he wrote before his disappearance. Special Collections Dept. J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah

  PROLOGUE

  IT WAS A CHILLY DAY in November 1934. The country had been mired in the Great Depression for over five years, and no town felt the pinch of poverty more acutely than Escalante. Founded by Mormon pioneers fifty-nine years earlier, the small settlement in southern Utah—then one of the remotest towns in the United States—had been stricken in successive summers by a plague of grasshoppers that ruined the crops and by the worst drought in nearly eight decades.

  In late autumn, the arrival of any visitor in Escalante was a rare occurrence. It was all the more surprising, then, when the thin, sandy-haired stranger rode into town from the west, saddled on one undersized burro, leading another that was packed with camping gear. His name, he told the locals, was Everett Ruess. He was from California. And although he was only twenty, he had been wandering all over the West and Southwest for the better part of the last five years.

  The young boys of Escalante took an instant liking to the vagabond. During the next several days they rode horseback with him along the nearby ridges, hunted for arrowheads, and shared his campfire dinner of venison and potatoes. One of those boys, ten years old at the time, was Norm Christensen. “He told us all about his family,” Christensen remembers. “Showed us how the Indians could make fire using sticks. We hiked the hills, showed him the Indian writings”—petroglyphs etched on the sandstone walls by Anasazi and Fremont people more than six hundred years earlier. “He didn’t brag on himself. Wasn’t a show-off. He said he’d come out to look the country over and make his paintings. Showed us some.”

  Another Escalante native, Melvin Alvey, was twenty-six years old that autumn. Decades later, standing in the front room of the house in which he had lived all his life, Alvey pointed out the window. “I talked to Everett over there in the street as he was leavin’ town,” he recalled. “He had these two little burros. They didn’t stand that high.” Alvey flattened his palm four feet above the rug. “I don’t think either of ’em had fifty pounds [loaded] on ’em. I looked at those two little burros, goin’ out in November. He never even had a tent. Didn’t have a good camp stove.”

  Alvey tilted his head back, summoning memories. “He said he was goin’ to go down in the Desert and stay six weeks. Claimed he was goin’ to be an artist and write stories. He didn’t have enough for one week, let alone six. I said, ‘It looks like you’re travelin’ pretty light.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I don’t need much.’ ”

  According to Norm Christensen, “Everett had a lot of spotted dog in his pack bags—rice and raisins with condensed milk. We gave him a bunch of potatoes. Offered him bottled fruit, but he just didn’t have room for it.”

  Arnold Alvey, Melvin’s nephew, six years old in 1934, recalls, “He came to our place on the outskirts of town. I was standin’ out there by the well, here come this young guy with a coupla little gray burros. I’d never seen burros before.

  “He said, ‘Could I water my burros in your trough?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He had on a floppy hat. A light-colored orange shirt that fluttered in the breeze. He had quite high cheekbones. Quite a nice-lookin’ guy. Said he was goin’ down in the Desert to spend the winter. I can see it like it was yesterday.”

  “Last night he was here,” Norm Christensen recounted, “he took some of us kids to the picture show. It was called Death Takes a Holiday. Probably cost ten cents. Everett treated us.”


  Christensen shook his head. “I still remember him wavin’ next morning as he passed on down the river.”

  “I’ve thought about him quite a bit over the years,” Melvin Alvey confessed. “Whenever it gets cold. To go down there and draw as an artist, in November, when you only got three–four hours of decent weather in the day … I think he had some plans that nobody knew.”

  From Escalante that November, Everett set out southeast down the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail. The path had been blazed during the winter of 1879–80 by a remarkable band of Mormon pioneers, as they crossed the Colorado River, forged their way through labyrinthine canyons and mesas, and finally established the town of Bluff on the San Juan River, the first Mormon stronghold in southeast Utah. Fifty-four years after the pioneers, Everett gradually left behind the piñon-juniper forest that sheltered Escalante and its outskirts, as he passed through an increasingly barren landscape of slickrock and drifting orange sand—the badlands that the locals simply called the Desert.

  A week down the trail, more than fifty miles out of Escalante, Everett ran into a pair of sheepherders at the head of Soda Gulch, a short, dry tributary of the Escalante River. Addlin Lay and Clayton Porter invited the young man to share their campfire. He stayed two nights, during which he quizzed the sheepherders about the canyons, trails, and prehistoric ruins to the east. Lay and Porter offered Everett a quarter of mutton, but the young man said he didn’t have room for it in his burros’ saddlebags. He had plenty of food of his own, he insisted.

  On the morning of November 21, Everett parted ways with the sheepherders. They watched him as he ambled with his burros farther southeast, headed for the Hole-in-the-Rock, the steep cleft in the nine-hundred-foot precipice down which the Mormon pioneers, with painstaking care, had lowered their eighty-three wagons in January and February of 1880 before ferrying them across the Colorado River.