The Vanishing of Everett Ruess

In November of nineteen thirty four, a slight twenty year old artist and poet named Everett Ruess rode out of Escalante with two burros, heading into the canyons of the Escalante River, and was never seen again. Ruess was a wanderer from California who had spent years roaming the Southwest on foot and by pack animal, sketching, writing lyrical letters home, and falling ever deeper in love with the wild desert. He left Escalante that month, telling the last people who saw him that he would be out of touch for weeks.

When months passed with no word, and mail sent to him went unanswered, his worried parents alerted the town, and a search party set out early the next year. Searchers found his two burros grazing near Davis Gulch, a side canyon of the river, along with a corral he had built. But of Everett himself there was no trace, except for a strange inscription carved near his last camp, a single word, Nemo, and the year, nineteen thirty four.

Nemo means nobody in Latin, an echo of the name Odysseus used to trick the Cyclops and the name of the captain in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a book Everett loved. What became of him has never been solved. Some believe he drowned crossing the river, some that he fell, some that he was killed by cattle rustlers, and some that he simply chose to vanish into the country he adored.

Nearly a century later, the desert has kept its secret.