The young boys of Escalante were delıghted to spend tıme wıth the vagabond. Wıth hım they rode horseback along the nearby rıdges, huntıng for arrowheads, and they shared hıs campfıre dınner of venıson and potatoes. On hıs last nıght ın town, Ruess (pronounced ROO-ess) took a couple of the boys to the movıe theater, payıng theır dıme admıssıons. They watched Death Takes a Holıday.

Norm Christensen was ten years old that November. Today, at 74, he lives a few blocks from the house he grew up in. "Everett showed us how the Indians could make fire using sticks," Christensen says. "We hiked the hills, showed him the Indian writings"—petroglyphs etched into sandstone walls by the Anasazi and Fremont peoples more than 700 years ago. "He didn’t brag on himself. Wasn’t a show-off. Just a hell of a nice ordinary guy. He said he’d come out to look the country over and make his paintings. In these boxes loaded into pack bags on his burros, he carried a lot of ‘spotted dog’—rice and raisins, with condensed milk. We gave him a bunch of potatoes. Offered him bottled fruit, but he just didn’t have room for it.

"I still remember him waving as he passed on down the river."

From Escalante, in search of solitude and beauty, Ruess rode southeast along the Hole in the Rock Trail, which had been blazed by Mormon pioneers in 1879-80. Snow already dusted the top of Kaiparowits Plateau, looming on his right. Within the fortnight, a screaming three-day blizzard would sweep the canyon country.

A week after waving goodbye to Norm Christensen, Ruess, now 50 miles out, shared a campfire with a pair of sheepherders. Shortly after that he may have run into another party, cattlemen riding the Escalante Desert’s farthest range.

Then Everett Ruess disappeared from the face of the Earth. He was 20 years old.

During the last century and a half, dozens of wanderers have vanished in the labyrinthine canyons or on the trackless plateaus of the stark and sparsely inhabited American Southwest. Many, like Ruess, have never been found. Ordinarily, the only memorial such a bewildered loner leaves behind is a sheaf of increasingly laconic newspaper stories, wrapped in the silent grief of those who loved him. But nearly 65 years after Everett Ruess disappeared on the Escalante Desert, you can rouse a lively debate in almost any bar between Santa Fe and Flagstaff over the possible ways he met his fate.

Ruess "lives" while others have faded from consciousness for a variety of reasons, chief among them the fact that his zeal for the wilderness, passionately expressed in the scores of letters he posted from wherever he found himself on his wanderings, makes him a natural avatar for anyone who has ever shared such longings for escape. That and the fact that he disappeared before his zeal could wane.

Through many months during five consecutive years, Ruess wandered the West, often alone. No matter where he found himself, every week or so he managed to post a long, rhapsodic letter to his parents in Los Angeles, to his brother, Waldo, four years his senior, or to one among his handful of close friends. As he traveled, he painted the landscape in watercolors; back home in Los Angeles, he converted his raptures into block prints.