Finding Everett Ruess by David Roberts, with a foreword by
Jon Krakauer, is the definitive biography of the artist,
writer, and eloquent celebrator of the wilderness whose bold
solo explorations of the American West and mysterious
disappearance in the Utah desert at age 20 have earned him a
large and devoted cult following. More than 75 years after
his vanishing, Ruess stirs the kinds of passion and
speculation accorded such legendary doomed American
adventurers as Into the Wild’s Chris McCandless and Amelia
Earhart.
“I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its
beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the
time. I prefer the saddle to the street car and the star
sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail,
leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep
peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.” So
Everett Ruess wrote in his last letter to his brother. And
earlier, in a valedictory poem, ”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 diseases;
Lonely and wet and cold . . . but that I kept my dream!"
Wandering alone with burros and pack horses through
California and the Southwest for five years in the early
1930s, on voyages lasting as long as ten months, Ruess also
became friends with photographers Edward Weston and Dorothea
Lange, swapped prints with Ansel Adams, took part in a Hopi
ceremony, learned to speak Navajo, and was among the first
"outsiders" to venture deeply into what was then (and to
some extent still is) largely a little-known wilderness.
When he vanished without a trace in November 1934, Ruess
left behind thousands of pages of journals, letters, and
poems, as well as more than a hundred watercolor paintings
and blockprint engravings. A Ruess mystique, initiated by
his parents but soon enlarged by readers and critics who,
struck by his remarkable connection to the wild, likened him
to a fledgling John Muir. Today, the Ruess cult has more
adherents—and more passionate ones—than at any time in the
seven-plus decades since his disappearance. By now, Everett
Ruess is hailed as a paragon of solo exploration, while the
mystery of his death remains one of the greatest riddles in
the annals of American adventure. David Roberts began
probing the life and death of Everett Ruess for National
Geographic Adventure magazine in 1998. Finding Everett Ruess
is the result of his personal journeys into the remote areas
explored by Ruess, his interviews with oldtimers who
encountered the young vagabond and with Ruess’s closest
living relatives, and his deep immersion in Ruess’s writings
and artwork. It is an epic narrative of a driven and
acutely perceptive young adventurer’s expeditions into the
wildernesses of landscape and self-discovery, as well as an
absorbing investigation of the continuing mystery of his
disappearance.
In this definitive account of Ruess's extraordinary life and
the enigma of his vanishing, David Roberts eloquently
captures Ruess's tragic genius and ongoing fascination.
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