Half a decade had done nothing to blunt the ferocity of that suspicion; no one was eager to talk—though just about everyone was polite enough to suggest someone else who might be. And one name that kept coming up was Melvin Alvey. There are not many people still alive in Escalante who met Everett Ruess during those several November days before he rode off into the void. Alvey, still active and alert at 91, is one of the few.

"I talked to him over there in the street as he was leaving town," said Alvey, pointing out the front window of his house. "We talked quite a bit about the country. He had these two little burros. They didn’t stand that high." Alvey flattened his hand four feet above the rug. "I don’t think either one had 50 pounds [loaded] on ’em. I looked at those two little burros, goin’ out in November. He never even had a tent. Didn’t have a good camp stove.

"He said he was goin’ to go down in the desert and stay six weeks. Claimed he was goin’ down to be an artist and write stories. He had so little; he didn’t have enough for one week, let alone six. I said, ‘It looks like you’re travelin’ pretty light.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I don’t need much.’ I’ve thought about him quite a bit. Whenever it gets cold. To go down there and draw as an artist, in November, when you only got three, four hours of decent weather in the day . . . I think he had some plans that nobody knew."

Everett’s last letter, to his brother Waldo, is dated November 11, 1934. In it, he seems eerily to anticipate his vanishing: "As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. . . . This has been a full, rich year. I have left no strange or delightful thing undone that I wanted to do. . . . It may be a month or two before I have a post office, for I am exploring southward to the Colorado [River], where no one lives."

Three months later, Everett’s parents received their own letters to their son, returned unclaimed from Marble Canyon, Arizona—the post office nearest the point where Everett had planned to resurface. Worried, they sent an inquiry to the postmistress at Escalante, where Everett’s last letter had been mailed.

At the beginning of March 1935, the ranchers of Escalante launched a search. The two sheepherders who had bumped into Ruess on November 19, far down the Hole in the Rock Trail, had camped at the head of Soda Gulch, one of the last right-bank tributaries of the Escalante River before it empties into the Colorado. The searchers combed Soda Gulch on horseback without finding anything; likewise, they poked the length of Willow Gulch, two miles northwest of Soda, with no results.

In Davis Gulch—the next tributary southeast of Soda—they struck pay dirt. An old horsepacking trail enters Davis from the left, two-thirds of the way down its short but sinuous course: The trail, in fact, is the only easy route in and out of the canyon. As soon as they reached the bottom of the horse trail, the searchers found Ruess’s last camp.

As W. L. Rusho put together the story in 1983, the men on horseback found Ruess’s burros enclosed in a brushwork corral. The animals were "fat and healthy," the head of the search party reported—this despite the fact that they may have spent three months in their prison. The men also found, draped on the brush fence, a bridle, halter, and rope. In a nearby alcove, they came across empty cans, candy wrappers, the impression of a bedroll in the dust, and numerous footprints. But as they searched on, pushing as far as they could ride up- and down-canyon, they found no trace of Ruess’s camping gear, cook set, food, painting kit, or diary.