Dirtbag Writer

The West’s Most Precious Vagabond – Everett Reuss Lost Again

Posted on 30. Oct, 2009 by Writer in On The Road

Lost, Found and Lost Again

One of the West’s biggest mysteries has become a mystery again.  At the age of 20, Everett Reuss went into the Utah desert near Escalante with two burros and was never seen again.  The mystery of Reuss took on legendary proportions.  Some thought Reuss was murdered or that he stepped off a precipitous cliff in the Escalante or that he drowned in the mighty Colorado.  Some believed he had taken a Native American bride or had one reason or another to willingly disappear from society.  Some even believed he was still alive until a report last April stated that Everett’s remains had been found in a remote region in southwest Utah.  It was thought that mystery of Everett Reuss had finally been solved.

In Reuss’s short life he traveled extensively through the wilderness of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado.  Reuss spent his early years trekking through remote parts of the High Sierra throughout Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks.  He traveled by horse or with burros and explored the uncharted areas of the desert southwest most times solo.

Reuss was a gifted poet, writer, and an artist.  Throughout his travels, Reuss corresponded frequently with his family members and his letters are published in a book – Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty.  His story was also touched on briefly alongside the story of Christopher McCandless in Jon Krakauer’s famed Into the Wild.

Coyote Gulch - Escalante, Utah

I too was moved by Everett’s spirit.  I lived for a short time in Escalante where his spirit was well alive and the mystery strong.  I worked for a man whom after reading Everett’s story left his life in the Great Plains to discover the land that Everett found to be the most beautiful of all his wanderings.  Working in a café, I spoke with so many travelers inspired in some way by Everett to visit the lands of the Escalante.

When I first found out they had identified Reuss’s remains in a remote section in southeastern Utah – I was thrilled.  But then my excitement slowly faded to discontent.  I almost wished those ruins were not confirmed to be his.  Everett Reuss has inspired people into the wilderness for nearly a century and I feared that if he was found his story might not hold onto that same power it had possessed for the last 75 years.

Unfortunately a mystery is only a mystery for so long.  What if Christopher McCandless had survived that winter in Alaska, what if he hadn’t mistaken that plant, what if someone had found him and got him out of there – well then we wouldn’t have that beautiful story that makes us question the way we are living our life, that makes us squeeze our loved ones just a little bit tighter, that makes us think there must be something more than this.

I was shocked by the recent news that the remains found last spring were not that of Everett Reuss.  I felt a bit guilty for once wishing that they weren’t his, at least for the family’s sake.  I am still quite puzzled at how all those DNA and forensic tests had at one point confirmed that the remains were Reuss and now they are totally sure the remains are that of a Native American.  I would think one would want to be pretty damn sure before claiming to solve one of the adventure’s oldest mysteries.  For now the mystery remains.

“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.” -from the last letter Ruess sent to his brother, dated November 11, 1934

See the October 21, 2009 New York Times article here.

See the original report of Finding Everett Reuss in National Geographic Adventure here.

The Canyons of the Escalante

Tags: Utah