In 1983, a Salt Lake City writer, W. L. Rusho, collected the letters and prints in a deft memoir titled Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty. The book has become a Southwest classic. Then, in 1996, Jon Krakauer devoted ten pages of his best-selling Into the Wild to the conundrum of Ruess’s disappearance, seeing in the loner of the 1930s striking parallels to Chris McCandless, the 24-year-old idealist who had recently starved to death north of Mount McKinley.

Ruess’s letters, often grandiose, always striving for the lyrical, reveal an aesthete tortured by internal struggles:

I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty.

Writing in 1942, Wallace Stegner categorized the would-be artist as a "callow romantic." But he added, "If we laugh at Everett Ruess, we shall have to laugh at John Muir because there was little difference between them except age." Ruess was, claimed Stegner, "one of the few who died—if he died—with the dream intact."

Ruess’s disappearance on the far reaches of the Escalante Desert made him an enigma as tantalizing as any in the Southwest.

The various scenarios offered over the years to explain Ruess’s disappearance reduce to four distinct theories. The first, which can be dismissed out of hand, is that he wandered off from Escalante, resurfaced on the Navajo reservation, went native, and lived out his days under an assumed identity. The second is that he committed suicide, concocting his end in such a way that no one might find his body. The third is that he died in an accident: falling off a cliff somewhere, drowning in the San Juan or Colorado River, or freezing to death on some forlorn plateau, perhaps in the three-day blizzard that hit late that November. The fourth is that he was murdered.

After months of thorough searches for Everett Ruess’s body, after the assiduous later researches of W. L. Rusho and others, above all after the passage of so many years, I doubted there was much left to discover about Ruess’s curious disappearance. Still, the more time I spent in the Southwest, the harder it became to shake my fascination with his tale. Finally, I headed out to Escalante last May to see for myself just how scattered lay the puzzle pieces of his vanishing—to see if the mystery could be solved.

On my first visit to the town, in 1993, I had been struck by just how insular and xenophobic it was. Most of the Mormon families in Escalante (pronounced by locals ES-ca-LANT, rhymed with "slant") have roots in southwest Utah that reach back into the 19th century. The decades of wringing a living from its fields and pastures have bred a fierce distrust of outsiders.