Ruess

On November 12, 1934, a peripatetic young artist named Everett Ruess loaded up his pack burros, said goodbye to the friends he’d made in the remote Mormon settlement of Escalante, Utah, and resumed a journey of exploration – both cartographic and spiritual – that had come to define his young life.  His intention, as expressed in letters he’d posted to his family in California, was to travel south – either across the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry and back onto the Navajo reservation from which he’d come, or else into the maze of side canyons marking the Escalante River’s confluence with the Colorado, and thence eastward, crossing the latter somewhere above its junction with the San Juan River gorge.

He was never heard from again. Continue reading →