I first became interested in Everett Ruess in the early 1980s, when I read Bud Rusho’s Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, the first book to offer a collection of the young adventurer’s writing and art work. Everett had disappeared in November 1934 somewhere near Davis Gulch, a tributary of the Escalante River in the remote wilderness of southern Utah. Over the decades, many people had tried to solve the mystery of the disappearance, but nobody came up with a convincing explanation. Yet thanks to the precocious intensity of Everett’s vision, expressed in his haunting block prints and watercolors and his fevered prose, poetry, and letter-writing, by the 1980s he had become the object of a cult. His fiercest devotees were counter-culture desert rats of a latter generation. Some of them hiked into Davis Gulch to try to solve the mystery of Everett’s demise by themselves. Others memorized his pithier apothegms, such as “I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear,” or “One way and another, I have been flirting pretty heavily with Death, the old clown."

My fascination with Everett wasn’t unqualified, however. Some of those sayings (like the two quoted above) seemed a bit over the top, verging on the melodramatic. But, I reminded myself, those pronouncements had been written by a kid who had only just turned twenty when he vanished.

What really impressed me about Everett were his journeys themselves, which stretched over as many as ten consecutive months of solo wandering through a Southwest that was far wilder and less well known in the 1930s than it was half a century later. I’d become a passionate prowler through the Southwest myself, and had visited many of the obscure canyons and plateaus Everett crisscrossed during the years of the Great Depression. But I’d never undertaken any solo journeys on the scale of Everett’s.

In the mid-1990s, my friend and climbing buddy Jon Krakauer was deep into his research about the disappearance and death in Alaska of another young vagabond named Chris McCandless. One day I told Jon, “This McCandless kid sounds a lot like Everett Ruess.”

“Who’s Everett Ruess?” Jon blurted out. But at once he got hold of Rusho’s book, made his own pilgrimage into Davis Gulch, and started drawing the startling parallels between the two doomed loners that fueled a key chapter in Jon’s book about McCandless. Jon identified with both Ruess and McCandless, seeing them as true kindred souls. When Into the Wild became a lasting bestseller, Everett won a whole new audience of enthusiasts.

By 2008, however, I thought there was nothing new to be learned about Everett or his fate. Then, out of the blue, came an astonishing new story that seemed to link up with Everett--about a Navajo elder who in the 1930s had sat atop a ridge in southern Utah and watched as a solo wanderer with two pack animals was chased down the bed of Chinle Wash and murdered by Utes. The elder’s grandson thought he had found the grave of the young white man who had met his end in such a gruesome fashion.

I plunged back into the story, making several trips to the secret grave site, then arranging for DNA tests to compare the victim with Everett. When the tests came back with a perfect match, we believed we had solved the legendary mystery. For six months, we were convinced we had found Everett’s remains.

Alas, the truth turned out to be a lot murkier than I’d hoped. But as I followed the twists and turns of this old detective story, I discovered a much deeper and more complex Everett Ruess than I’d first encountered, a visionary of whom Rusho and Everett’s other panegyrists had only scratched the surface.

Finding Everett Ruess, then, is the most complete appreciation I can craft of the wanderer, artist, poet, and prophet who remains unique in the annals of American wilderness. The Ruess cult is now at an all-time peak. I hope my book helps to frame the blazing streak of Everett’s meteoric passage across the desert sky, and to pay homage to his artistic and poetic gifts, giving him the posthumous recognition that he hoped so despairingly to win in his lifetime.

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