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Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer Review

David Roberts'"Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer" is an amazing amalgam of psychological jigsaw puzzle, wilderness travel writing and the best ever episode of the TV show "Cold Case."
The first part of this unfailingly fascinating study introduces us to Everett Ruess who, in 1931 at the age of sixteen, "started traveling by horse and burro and on foot through the canyons and plateaus" of the western USA, particularly the southwest. An aspiring artist and watercolor painter, the details of his traveling and his psyche are pieced together by diary entries as well as a steady stream of letters to his parents Christopher and Stella, his brother Waldo and a small assortment of friends and folks he met along the way. Described by famous American author Wallace Stegner as "one of those, a callow romantic, an adolescent aesthete, an atavistic wanderer of the wastelands" who "was after beauty, and he conceived beauty in pretty romantic terms."
Everett Ruess' wandering through vast expanses of the west, usually solo and very often the only white man to have been to certain natural wonders, continued on until his unexplained disappearance in 1935. At this point Mr. Roberts' book switches from a semi-biography of Everett into the story of his parents' and brother's attempts, with the help of a vast number of colorful real-life Western characters, to finding Everett himself or, at worst an explanation of his disappearance.
As a way of preserving his legacy after a variety of search and rescue missions all failed, the Ruess family from 1935 on tried to find a publisher for a collection of his writings and art. Finally in 1940 a California publisher brought out a "miscellany" titled "On Desert Trails With Everett Ruess" which, though it sold poorly, "went viral" (as we would call it today) and a Ruess cult was born, gathering momentum over the decades, including the aforementioned Wallace Stegner who devoted a chapter to Ruess is his 1942 book "Mormon Country."
This cult of personality continuing growing internationally and was further spurred on by the 1983 publication of "Everett Ruess: Vagabond for Beauty by W. L. Rusho.
Jump forward to the spring of 1992 when "a twenty-four-year-old man from suburban Washington D.C....hitchhiked to Alaska and walked into the wilderness to live off the land." His name was Chris McCandless and four months later his "emaciated remains were discovered by moose hunters near the northern boundary of Denali National Park."
Enter well known nonfiction writer John Krakauer. Assigned by Outside Magazine to write a story about the tragedy, in 1996 he subsequently expanded that story into the best selling book "Into The Wild" (ultimately converted to the screen as an Oscar nominated movie directed by Sean Penn). While researching for the expansion into a book length project, Mr. Krakauer was told by David Roberts [the author of this book] that McCandless sounded an awful lot like Everett Ruess.
Mr. Krakauer promptly went out and read the aforementioned "Everett Ruess: Vagabond for Beauty" and was so impressed by the similarity of the two that he included 11 pages about Everett in "Into The Wild," kicking the Ruess cult into orbit in the way only a huge bestseller can, paving the way for this book's existence.
But all was not over in the search for Everett Ruess. After 75 years new clues were found, new theories proposed and super-modern technologies used to try to find answers once and for all for this conundrum. The final third of "Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer" tells the ongoing saga.
This book is fascinating with as many twists and turns as a narrow mountain trail or a good murder mystery. The writing is propulsive and I finished the 375+ pages in 3 sittings. At the risk of sounding silly, it was like reading television. Obviously from the book's title we know that the disappearance was officially unsolved but the answers are rendered pretty clearly, a welcome reward for staying with this wonderful book with a fascinating title character and a wide, colorful supporting cast.
If I had to quibble about anything, certain comments and excepts are repeated several times through the three sections of the book leaving me thinking "I remember the first two times you used that quote."
Definitely recommended.

Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer Overview

Finding Everett Ruess by David Roberts, with a foreword by Jon Krakauer, is the definitive biography of the artist, writer, and eloquent celebrator of the wilderness whose bold solo explorations of the American West and mysterious disappearance in the Utah desert at age 20 have earned him a large and devoted cult following. More than 75 years after his vanishing, Ruess stirs the kinds of passion and speculation accorded such legendary doomed American adventurers as Into the Wild's Chris McCandless and Amelia Earhart.“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 street car and the 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." So Everett Ruess wrote in his last letter to his brother. And earlier, in a valedictory poem, "Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary; That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun; Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases; Lonely and wet and cold . . . but that I kept my dream!"Wandering alone with burros and pack horses through California and the Southwest for five years in the early 1930s, on voyages lasting as long as ten months, Ruess also became friends with photographers Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange, swapped prints with Ansel Adams, took part in a Hopi ceremony, learned to speak Navajo, and was among the first "outsiders" to venture deeply into what was then (and to some extent still is) largely a little-known wilderness.When he vanished without a trace in November 1934, Ruess left behind thousands of pages of journals, letters, and poems, as well as more than a hundred watercolor paintings and blockprint engravings. A Ruess mystique, initiated by his parents but soon enlarged by readers and critics who, struck by his remarkable connection to the wild, likened him to a fledgling John Muir. Today, the Ruess cult has more adherents-and more passionate ones-than at any time in the seven-plus decades since his disappearance. By now, Everett Ruess is hailed as a paragon of solo exploration, while the mystery of his death remains one of the greatest riddles in the annals of American adventure. David Roberts began probing the life and death of Everett Ruess for National Geographic Adventure magazine in 1998.Finding Everett Ruess is the result of his personal journeys into the remote areas explored by Ruess, his interviews with oldtimers who encountered the young vagabond and with Ruess's closest living relatives, and his deep immersion in Ruess's writings and artwork. It is an epic narrative of a driven and acutely perceptive young adventurer's expeditions into the wildernesses of landscape and self-discovery, as well as an absorbing investigation of the continuing mystery of his disappearance. In this definitive account of Ruess's extraordinary life and the enigma of his vanishing, David Roberts eloquently captures Ruess's tragic genius and ongoing fascination.From the Hardcover edition.

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