The Kid Who Rode Into the Canyonlands and Never Came Back

In February 1935, government officials and media outlets across the American Southwest received the same typed letter. “Dear Sir,” it read, “Can you help us? Have you seen or heard of our son?”

Everett Ruess had gone missing while trekking through the region’s remote gulches and buttes, and his parents were desperate to find him. “Everett is not inexperienced as he has lived this way in the mountains for four seasons, but not during December and January,” explained Christopher and Stella Ruess. “He may have travelled into great danger.”

The recipients of the letter—postmasters and sheriffs, trading post operators and Indian agents, forest rangers and newspaper editors—all responded sympathetically to the anxious parents. But even those who’d encountered the young explorer hadn’t seen him for months. None of them knew where he was.

Ruess was only 20 years old when he disappeared. For most of the previous four years, he had been traveling alone, by foot and donkey, through the Southwest’s canyonlands. Unlike other Western explorers, however, he was not searching for rich mineral lodes, unclaimed territory or even the easiest passage through difficult land. Instead, he wanted to make art—primarily watercolors, block prints, and poetry—in “what was, ten years ago, the final frontier,” as he put it to a friend.

Little known when he vanished more than 90 years ago, Ruess has since become a cult figure. He’s been compared to John Muir and Henry David Thoreau for his ecstatic writing about wild places, and to pilot Amelia Earhart and climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine for his mysterious disappearance. Legendary chroniclers of the American West such as Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey celebrated his adventurous spirit, while Escalante, Utah—the town where he was last seen—recognizes him as the artist he aspired to be with an annual art festival in his honor.

Yet despite multiple searches, several unidentified bodies, a few DNA tests, and some doubtful confessions, we are no closer to knowing what happened to Ruess now than his parents were when they sent that panicked letter.

Born March 28, 1914, Ruess was raised to be an artist. His father, Christopher, was a Unitarian minister who left the profession for a job that would support his wife, Stella, and sons, Waldo and Everett, as well as his aging parents. The family moved frequently, but wherever they were, Stella—an artist, poet, and dancer—ensured that Everett, the youngest, received art instruction. When they lived in Brooklyn in 1920, that meant classes at the Pratt Institute; during their four-year sojourn in Valparaiso, Indiana, mother and son regularly traveled the 50 miles to the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1928, the family left Indiana to settle for good in Los Angeles.

Everett was a born wanderer. In an early family account, Stella wrote that her energetic little boy, whom she nicknamed “Lord of Misrule,” often ran away: “Once he went a mile, over the bridge and the railroad tracks. I telephoned the police station and found he had been reported.” She took to tying him to the porch, a tree, even his bed when it was time to sleep, “for Safety First.”

By the time he was 16 he was exceedingly restless. In June 1930, during summer vacation, Everett launched his first solo travel, hitchhiking up the California coast to Carmel. There, he introduced himself to photographer Edward Weston with the brazenness that would characterize his interactions with artists he admired. In this instance, his charm worked: He ended up staying with Weston’s family for three weeks.

From Carmel, he headed to Big Sur and then on to Yosemite—hitchhiking, walking, and camping in the open air. “I sleep quite well on the ground here and don’t mind it at all,” he told his family in a letter. “I could very happily keep up this life indefinitely if I had the money.”

Instead, he returned home to Los Angeles and the confining academic schedule. In January 1931, he graduated from Hollywood High School. The following month he was on the road again, hitchhiking east to Kayenta, Arizona, a small town within the Navajo Nation.

He had little knowledge of the region, only having been in the southwest once before, when he and his mother had made a cross-country train trip with a quick detour to the Grand Canyon in 1923. He knew even less about Navajo culture—or any other Indigenous culture, for that matter—or about how to survive in the desert.

Yet Everett somehow managed. He bought a burro for six dollars—the first of many unlucky pack animals—and befriended John Wetherill, a guide, trader, and member of the ranching family known for exploring and excavating Ancestral Puebloan ruins like Mesa Verde. Wetherill made him a map of cliff dwellings to visit.

Over the course of 10 months, he tramped through Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly, the Grand Canyon, and Zion National Park, traveling some 1,000 miles on foot. “This country suits me nearly to perfection,” he told a friend.

Everett returned to Los Angeles in December 1931 but by March 1932 he was back in Roosevelt, Arizona, where he’d left his latest brace of burros. He found this stint in the southwest much more difficult: He had a rupture with friends who came out to join him, and he seemed to suffer from anemia, which sapped his strength and apparently caused pain in his eyes. In his diary, he wrote, “the trip was foredoomed to failure.” At the end of the summer, he hitchhiked home and, much to his father’s relief, enrolled as a freshman at UCLA.

His college career didn’t last long. By January 1933, he’d quit and begun making his way north through California’s mountains. Eventually he arrived in San Francisco, eager to embrace the life of an urban bohemian. He managed to meet the painter Maynard Dixon and the photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, but he couldn’t sell enough paintings to make the hubbub of the city worthwhile. Within four months, he was on a ship to Los Angeles and planning his next foray into the Southwest.

On April 14, 1934, Waldo dropped Everett off in Kayenta. It was the last time he saw his brother.

We don’t know very much about what Everett experienced during this last expedition. He kept a diary but it was never recovered. And he devoted more space in his surviving letters to rhapsodic descriptions of the landscape than to details about his itinerary.

We know he wandered through Chinle, Canyon de Chelly, and the Lukachukai and Carrizo Mountains. He climbed Navajo Mountain and was hired on as cook and packer for an archaeological expedition surveying Ancestral Puebloan ruins within Navajo Nation. He participated in the Antelope Dance in Mishongnovi, a Hopi village, and returned to the Grand Canyon. He visited one of the archaeologists in Flagstaff and stayed for a time with Bryce Canyon’s head ranger and his nine children.

Everett’s letters give a hint to his mindset. Early in the trip, his burros ran off in the night. He started retracing his steps back to Kayenta to get help looking for them, but then changed his mind. “For a long time,” he wrote in a letter to Waldo, “I had flattered myself that I could ‘take it,’ and always had, without complaint, so I thought this was a good time to show myself.” He would locate the animals himself. His persistence paid off: The next morning he found the two donkeys, unhurt and with their packs mostly intact.

His single-mindedness came with risks, though. “I had many other thrills when I trusted my life to crumbling sandstone and angles little short of the perpendicular, in the search for waterholes and cliff dwellings,” he admitted a few weeks later to Waldo. “Often I was surprised myself when I came out alive and on top.”

To a friend, he wrote, “Yesterday I did some miraculous climbing on a nearly vertical cliff, and escaped unscathed, too. One way and another, I have been flirting pretty heavily with Death, the old clown.”

Still, what runs most deeply through these last letters is a sense of the sublime. “I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear,” he tells a family friend.

In early November, Everett rode into Escalante, Utah, a small Mormon town. He stayed a few days, and even went to the movies with some of the local boys. On November 11, 1934, he mailed his last two letters: one to his parents, the other to his brother.

“I am going south towards the [Colorado] river now, through some rather wild country,” he told Christopher and Stella, warning that he would not have access to a post office for a couple of months. Anticipating their concerns, he added, “I am taking an ample supply of food with me.”

To Waldo, he wrote, “As to when I shall visit civilization; it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time.”

A week later, he shared a camp with two shepherds on the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail. They offered him a quarter of mutton, but he told them he didn’t need it. He was never seen again.

The postmistress in Escalante received one of the Ruesses’ letters and passed it onto her husband, Jennings Allen, a county commissioner. Allen organized a search in March 1, 1935, exploring the gulches that intersected the trail.

In Davis Gulch, they found two burros corralled in a brushwork fence and signs of a campsite: footprints, empty condensed milk cans, and candy wrappers. They assumed it was Everett’s camp but where were his bedroll, cooking gear, food, journal, and art supplies?

A second search later that month found footprints between Davis Gulch and the Hole-in-the-Rock, a site where Mormon emigrants had lowered their wagons down to the Colorado River.

A third search conducted by the Associated Civic Clubs of Southern Utah discovered two puzzling inscriptions on ancient sites deep within the gulch. Both read NEMO 1934.

Everett’s parents suspected it was a reference to the Odyssey: Nemo means no one, which is how Odysseus identified himself to the Cyclops who held him and his men captive. Or perhaps it was a reference to Captain Nemo from Jules Vernes’ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Everett had devoured both books.

“Nobody seriously doubts that the two signatures were Everett’s work,” writes David Roberts in Finding Everett Ruess, his definitive account of the young explorer’s life and disappearance.

Over time, four theories developed to explain Everett’s disappearance. The first theory argued that he’d been murdered by cattle rustlers. The local cattle association had been spreading a false rumor that an undercover government agent had come to the area to put a halt to the practice. Maybe Everett had stumbled upon a couple of rustlers and they’d killed him, thinking he was the agent. Many decades later, it was clear some older residents had some specific—and long dead—suspects in mind.

The second theory suggested that Everett had disappeared on purpose. Perhaps he fell in love with a Navajo girl and decided to stay in Navajo country. Or perhaps he crossed the border into Mexico. People claimed to have seen him but, as is often the case, those sightings couldn’t be confirmed.

The third theory cited the dramatic mood swings and despondence evident in some of Everett’s writings and wondered if he died from suicide.

The fourth theory is simply that Everett was killed in an accident. He fell from one of the cliffs he so recklessly scaled or drowned in the Escalante or Colorado rivers or was caught in a sudden snow storm or one of the many things that can happen to a solo traveler in untamed places, especially in winter.

Then, in 2008, human remains were found that appeared to be his.

Denny Bellson had never heard of Everett Ruess. He was just following up on a family story. Many years ago, his grandfather Aneth said he saw a young white man killed by Utes along Chinle Wash, miles away from Davis Gulch. Despite the Navajo taboo against touching dead bodies, Aneth buried the man above the wash on Comb Ridge and told few people about it. A dead white person on Navajo land could cause a lot of trouble.

Bellson found the remains just below the crest of Comb Ridge. A disintegrating saddle marked the spot. The body had been crammed into a crevice rather than carefully placed, as a traditional Navajo crevice burial would have been. Bellson called the FBI and the Navajo Nation archaeologist, but it was a friend who suggested this might be Ruess.

This is where David Roberts—and National Geographic—comes in. Roberts, an avid explorer and chronicler of the American Southwest, had written about the Ruess mystery for the inaugural issue of Adventure, a National Geographic magazine published from 1999 to 2009. He learned about Bellson’s find through a mutual friend.

Through his connections with Everett’s surviving relatives—Waldo’s four children, all born long after their uncle disappeared—and forensic scientists, Roberts coordinated the effort to identify the remains. Waldo had died in 2007 but his wife had kept his hair brush. An attempt was made to compare the skeleton’s DNA with follicles from the hair on the brush—a long shot that wasn’t conclusive.

Then a pair of scientists at the University of Colorado agreed to examine facial fragments from the skull to see if they matched photographs of Everett. Luckily, during Everett’s brief time in San Francisco, Dorothea Lange had made several striking portraits of the young man.

Meanwhile, another UC team had been recruited to compare the skeleton’s DNA to saliva samples from Everett’s nieces and nephews. Twenty-five percent of the DNA markers examined would have to match for the skeleton to be their uncle.

In April 2009, the National Geographic Society and the University of Colorado scientists announced that both tests were a match. The Everett Ruess mystery appeared to finally be solved.

Still, there were doubters. The most prominent one was Kevin Jones, the Utah state archaeologist. In a paper called “Everett Ruess—A Suggestion to Take Another Look,” Jones pointed out that shovel-shaped incisors like the ones on the skull were rare for people with European ancestry but common for Asians and Native Americans. And all the teeth were worn in a way more typical of a Native American diet.

Adventure diligently reported on the controversy, even though Roberts rejected Jones’s argument. At first, the Ruess family agreed: "We are 100 percent convinced that it is Everett," said Everett’s nephew Brian. But Jones’ criticism raised enough questions that the family decided to have the DNA tested for a third time.

In September 2009, Brian called Roberts. “It’s not Everett,” he said. “In fact, even worse, it’s a Native American.”

The family had enlisted the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, experts at identifying unknown soldiers. The lab performed a Y-chromosomal test, which only requires samples from the male line. For the skeleton to be Everett, 17 markers would have to match. Only one did.

It turned out that the software used by the University of Colorado scientists can produce false results when the size of the DNA sample is too small. The skeleton was returned to the Navajo Nation to be reburied.

Roberts, who died in 2021, wrote in Finding Everett Ruess that everyone “involved in the Comb Ridge find shared a profound sense of shame.” They’d dug up someone’s grave and brought more pain to the family that had already mourned Everett for decades.  

This debacle did not end the fascination with Ruess. He continues to be the subject of several songs and multiple podcast episodes. In a 2016 book, The Disappearances, writer Scott Thybony recounts a climb to another place where bones were found—and since lost—as a likely site for Everett to have fallen to his death. Just this month, Escalante held its 23rd-annual art festival in his honor, where aspiring artists can learn to paint en plein air, just as he did.

The only traces of Everett Ruess to be found now are in his writing and his art. “I have not tired of the wilderness,” he wrote in his last letter to Waldo. And, for all we know, he is still there.