Vanished Artist Sought Beauty, Solitude, Perhaps Nothingness

Everett Ruess disappeared into Utah’s red rock desert more than 65 years ago, but he still hasn’t been laid to rest.

Was the young artist and adventurer killed by cattle rustlers or adopted by the Navajo? Did he drown, freeze or starve to death? Or might he have taken his own life?

A new film suggests that whatever happened, Ruess just went too far in his quest for an ecstatic experience of beauty.

“We know what was guiding him was going to take him to his death. He was going to go too far,” said Diane Orr, the director of “Lost Forever: Everett Ruess,” which premiered in Salt Lake City in May. “He’d adopted that philosophy that he was going to go regardless of . . . safety. He’d declared himself a free man that would pursue nothing but beauty. And it was a very dramatic, romantic kind of position.”

And romantic enough to capture the imagination of artists, poets, environmentalists and desert rats across the Southwest.

The film, which mixes documentary and drama by following actor Mark Larson through his quest to understand the artist in order to play him, sees Ruess as an archetypal figure who sheds the trappings of civilization in search of a higher truth in nature.

“He has become a symbol of freedom, of going off on your own and doing your own thing and not conforming to the popular pattern of what people think your life should be,” said W.L. Rusho, who published Ruess’ letters in a book called, “Everett Ruess: Vagabond for Beauty.”

“It’s very idealistic and impractical for some people, but the idea is still there, to think, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if I could do that, wander off and make a living?’ To do your own thing and to heck with the world.”

That yearning drove Ruess away from his upper-class home in Los Angeles and into the wilderness. He first ventured into the Southwest in 1931 on a tour through Arizona. He was hooked.

He returned again and again, spending time with the Navajo in Monument Valley, visiting what’s now Bryce Canyon National Park and living with a Mormon family in southern Utah. In the midst of the Depression, he survived on a small allowance from his parents and picked up work where he could.

Between visits, he camped in the Sierra Nevada, visited San Francisco--which he hated--and spent a year at UCLA.

In 1934, he returned to the desert, writing in his journal that “it was like coming home.”

“What magnificent country I’ve seen,” Ruess wrote. “Tremendous wastelands, canyons hundreds of feet deep. This time in my wanderings I have had more reckless self-confidence than ever before. I have gone my way regardless of everything but beauty.”

That fall, Ruess headed out on his last journey. On Nov. 12, he packed up his two burros and left the town of Escalante, one of the last outposts of settlement, for the rugged desert now encompassed by the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.

“He said he was going to go down there to write and to draw pictures. But he was going the worst time of the year . . . the shortest days of the years and it was the coldest weather,” said Melvin Alvey, an Escalante resident who may have been one of the last people to see Ruess alive. Alvey--who was 25 at the time, five years older than Ruess--and his brother spoke with the adventurer for about 45 minutes as he headed out of town.

“As to when I shall revisit civilization, it will not be soon, I think,” Ruess wrote in his last letter home. “I prefer the deep peace of the wilderness to the discontent bred by cities.”

In the weeks that passed after his note, Ruess’ parents grew increasingly worried. In midwinter the mayor of Escalante called all able horsemen to join in a search.

They rode 60 miles to Davis Gulch, a desolate canyon near the Colorado River where Ruess was last seen by sheepherders. On the way, they found Ruess’ burros abandoned in a corral.

In the canyon they found foot tracks in the sand, a halter, a box of Ruess’ favorite brand of razor blades from a Los Angeles pharmacy and the word “Nemo”--Greek for “no one”--etched into a canyon wall.

The carving may have been a reference to the explorer Capt. Nemo in Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” a book Ruess adored. Or, Orr said, it could indicate his willingness to abandon his identity altogether. On an earlier journey, Ruess had shed his own name and at one point dubbed his burro “Everett.”

“You could say that he followed the pattern of a spiritual discovery of oneness much like medieval monks,” Orr said. “You give up materialism, you give up ambition, you give up fame . . . then you give up your ties to your friends and your family. Many people say that before he left California . . . he told some people he wouldn’t be returning to civilization.”

In “Lost Forever,” the actor who plays Ruess interviews a dozen people who came in contact with the young explorer. Some say he was ill-equipped for the elements or suicidally depressed. Others link two cowboys, Keith Riddle and Joe Pollock, to Ruess’ death.

Orr says as she worked on the film over the last several years, she was repeatedly told of Escalante residents who would confess the secret on their deathbeds. But as the years have passed and several players have died, no revelations have come.

One survivor is certain he knows the answer. Alvey, now 93, is convinced Ruess swam across the Colorado and moved onto the Navajo reservation, where he could be living still.

“I think he was just a big kid that wanted to get out and go,” Alvey said. “I’ve said all the time that he got lost by choice, that he didn’t want to be found. That’s just my opinion. Everybody has a right to their opinion.”