Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

by David Roberts

allied with the A’s—artist, author, archaeologist, and adventurer.

Clyde Kluckhohn’s To the Foot of the Rainbow,

Everett wrote to one friend. Another letter opens, “I have just been listening to Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D Minor. I turned out all the lights and danced to it—then to Saint-Saens’ bacchanal in ‘Samson and Delilah,’ until everything whirred.”

Viscol, which was on the back porch, a bottle of India ink, a few pencils for writing … an old pair of sunglasses

The brush was almost impenetrable. Taking my life in my hands, I reached down and caught his tail, loosed the makeshift spear, and whipped him out on the rocks. He was very much alive, but after a few tries, I mashed his flat head and cut it off.… Only six rattles, and he is not long, but what a fight we had. It was true sport.

Hunting rattler’s as I do comes nearer to real sport than almost anything I know. It has the necessary element of danger, for it is not sport unless opponents are somewhat evenly matched, and the quarry can turn the tables on the pursuer.

Richard Burton’s unexpurgated translation of the Arabian Nights and Edward FitzGerald’s brilliant and idiosyncratic rendering of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. At regular intervals, he transcribed stanzas of the latter into his diary, as well as summaries of the tales in the Arabian Nights. Everett’s enthusiasm for these Victorian versions of Near Eastern classics is significant, for both works are paeans to the hedonistic life. Yet both are full of carpe diem reminders of mortality. On July 22, after

On the website everettruess.net, today’s customer can buy numbered prints, postcards, journals, T-shirts, coffee mugs, water bottles, and refrigerator magnets (eight dollars apiece, shipping free) decorated with prints given arbitrary titles after Everett’s disappearance such as “Granite Towers,” “Fishing Shack,” “Junipers,” and “Tree No. 1.” Escalante Outfitters, a restaurant and outdoor gear shop in Escalante, sells Vagabond Ale, with a Dorothea Lange portrait of Everett on the label. Two bad detective novels, Jenny Kilb’s Pilgrim Fool (2003) and Jack Nelson’s To Die in Kanab (2006), spin their plots around modern sleuths solving the mystery of Everett’s fate. Debora L. Threedy, a University of Utah law professor, wrote a full-length play called The End of the Horizon that premiered in 2008 at Salt Lake City’s Plan-B Theater Company.

Scott Thybony. I had never met the man, but had read him for years, admiring such books as his Burntwater, a collection of sly, slender meditations on the Southwest.