I must apologize. I thought that some of you might have heard about Everett Ruess, but maybe not. He was a young man who hiked the back country of the desert in the Four Corners area of the southwest during the early 1930's. He was an artist who dreamed of one day being famous and he would paint water colors of the things he saw and sell them to support his "quest for beauty." What he is most remembered for, however, is a body of personal letters he penned to friends and relatives during those years. His descriptions of what he saw, to this day are unparalleled in writings of the desert. And this when he was only 17. Even Edward Abbey was impressed with Everett Ruess.
In September 1934 he wrote "I have taken more chances and had more wild adventures than ever before. And what magnificient country I have seen-wild, tremendous wasteland stretches, lost mesas, blue mountains rearing upward from vermillion sands of the desert...cloudbursts roaring down unnamed canyons."
In November 1934, when he was only 20, he mysteriously disappeared while camping in Davis Gulch near Escalante Utah. His burros were found at his campsight, but most of his camping gear was gone. On a rock wall he had carved the word "Nemo" (Latin for "no one"). Years later some of his gear was found near the present sight of Lake Powell, but that is all. There seems to be some evidence that he was murdered, but we just do not know. There was a massive search that included friends and relatives but nothing was ever turned up. For years "Desert" magazine would have an occasional article about him, along with pictures of his paintings, but the question was always "What happened to the quiet young soft spoken artist who worked with water colors? No one knows.
I recently ran across a review of an article that appeared in National Geographic Adventure magazine that seemed to imply that a grave might have been found, but I have yet to read the article itself. If anyone has any thoughts, insights , or quetions, please let me know.
