Everett Ruess

In February 1935, a search party riding through the remote canyon country of southern Utah came upon two burros grazing in a small, makeshift corral in a side canyon called Davis Gulch.

The burros belonged to a young man named Everett Ruess. He had been wandering the deserts of the American Southwest for years, alone, with his animals, his paints and his notebooks. He had not been heard from in three months.

Nearby, carved into the rock near an ancient cliff dwelling, the searchers found a word: NEMO. Below it, in some accounts, were the numbers 1934.

There was no sign of Everett. There never has been.

The Vagabond

Everett Ruess was born in 1914 in Oakland, California, into an artistic, intellectual family. His mother was a painter and poet; his father, a Harvard-educated minister and civil servant who encouraged his sons to think deeply about life. From an early age, Everett wrote poetry, painted, and made beautiful woodblock prints.

At sixteen, he set off alone on the first of the long journeys that would define his life. He hitchhiked and walked into the wilderness — Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada, the redwoods of Northern California, and, above all, the canyons and deserts of Arizona and Utah. He traveled with burros, carrying his food, his blankets, his art supplies and his books. He would vanish into the backcountry for months at a time, emerging only to pick up mail and supplies.

He wrote hundreds of letters to his family and friends, describing what he saw in vivid, rapturous prose: the colors of the canyon walls, the silence of the desert at night, the thrill of being alone in a place where few people had ever been. He met and corresponded with some of the great artists of his time, including the photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange and the painter Maynard Dixon. He was, by every account, a gifted, restless, romantic young man, who seemed to need beauty and solitude more than he needed people.

He also seemed to sense that his life might be short. In his letters, he wrote often about wanting to live intensely, to see as much beauty as he could, and about how he didn’t expect to grow old.

The Last Letters

In November 1934, Everett was twenty years old. He arrived in the small Mormon town of Escalante, in southern Utah, the gateway to one of the wildest and most remote regions in the lower forty-eight states: a vast maze of slickrock canyons, mesas and gorges carved by the Escalante River and its tributaries.

He stayed in town for a few days. He went to a movie with some local young people. On November 11, he wrote letters to his parents and to his brother, Waldo, saying he was heading out into the desert and wouldn’t be able to write for a month or two. In the letter to his brother, he wrote that it would not be soon that he visited civilization again — that he hadn’t tired of the wilderness, but rather enjoyed it more every day.

Then he headed southeast, toward the Escalante River and the canyon country beyond.

A few days later, two sheepherders camped in the desert met him on the trail. They were the last people known to have seen him.

The Search

When his parents didn’t hear from him for months, they became worried. In February 1935, they contacted the authorities in Escalante, and a search party was organized.

The searchers found his burros in Davis Gulch, a narrow tributary canyon of the Escalante River, penned in a rough enclosure of brush and branches. Nearby, they found evidence that someone had camped. And they found the inscription NEMO, carved into the soft sandstone near an Ancestral Puebloan ruin. Similar NEMO inscriptions were later found in other places nearby.

They did not find Everett’s belongings — his camping gear, his notebooks, his paints, his saddle and packs. Those were never found. Neither was he.

Nemo

Why NEMO?

Everett’s family believed they knew. Nemo is Latin for “no one” or “nobody.” In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is “Nobody” to escape from the monster’s cave. Everett loved the classics. He may have been signing his name in a way that only someone who knew him would understand. It was also the name of the mysterious captain in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a man who abandoned the world to live on his own terms.

To some, the inscription suggested that Everett had chosen to disappear — that he had decided to leave society behind and live in the wilderness, or perhaps to slip away to start a new life somewhere else. To others, it was simply the sort of romantic gesture a young poet might make, carved on a canyon wall before an accident.

The Theories

There are several theories about what happened to Everett Ruess.

Some believe he died in an accident: a fall while climbing in the canyons, a drowning in a flash flood, or a mistake in the desert’s harsh conditions. The canyon country is full of hidden ledges, slick rock and sudden floods.

Some believe he was murdered — perhaps by cattle rustlers, or by local men who wanted his burros or his belongings. Over the years, there have been rumors in Escalante about a local man who supposedly killed him.

Some believe he deliberately disappeared, and lived out his life under another name, perhaps among the Navajo, with whom he had spent time and whom he admired.

In 2009, a man on the Navajo Nation reported that his grandfather had witnessed Everett’s murder by a group of men near Comb Ridge in southeastern Utah, and had buried the body. Bones were found at the site, and an initial DNA test seemed to confirm that they were Everett’s. The news made headlines around the world. But later testing by a military forensic laboratory concluded that the bones were not his.

The mystery remained unsolved.

The Poet

Everett Ruess has become a legend in the American Southwest, and a kind of patron saint of wanderers and wilderness lovers. His letters and journals have been published and are still read today. Hikers and backpackers still go looking for his inscriptions in Davis Gulch. Every year, the town of Escalante celebrates Everett Ruess Days.

I’ve always thought of him as someone who knew exactly what he was looking for, and maybe found it. Whatever happened to him, he spent his last days doing what he loved, in the most beautiful place he knew.