Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  “He came through here,” Eric added, indicating not Cortez, where he was visiting Fred, but the Navajo Mountain area. “Came across the [Colorado] river and down Navajo Canyon. He wouldn’t stay with the Navajos, but he had a tree he’d camp under. They’d see his tracks and know he was back.”

  From the start of my inquiry, I had wondered what kinds of oral stories the Navajos might have preserved about Everett. But I also knew you didn’t just drop by an old-timer’s hogan and interview him. A well-guarded fragment of lore such as the one Eric was sharing with Fred had to be freely given, not asked for—and only after years of friendship and trust.

  The second odd piece of evidence came shortly after my Adventure piece was published, when a stranger named Greg Funseth sent me a provocative e-mail. On my next visit to Salt Lake City, I had lunch with Funseth. A fifty-one-year-old computer software engineer, Greg was a rock climber, a desert hiker, and a passionate fan of Everett Ruess. Now he had a compelling story to tell me.

  In 2001 he had made a solo backpacking trip into Davis Gulch, partly to commune with the spirit of Everett, but partly in hopes of discovering something new about the way the vagabond had met his end. For two days Greg explored every inch of the gulch, which he had to himself in early June. “I’m in one of the most inhospitable, remote places in the U.S.,” he wrote in his diary. “I love this place!” At times he would stop and shout to the surrounding walls, “Are you here, Everett?”

  On the third day, Greg found an obscure and difficult route out of the gulch on the opposite side from the old livestock trail by which he had entered. It was, apparently, an Anasazi hand-and-toe trail that I had missed in 1998. Then Greg wandered aimlessly across the slickrock plateau that stretched beyond. Beneath a short sandstone cliff, he stopped for lunch. It was only after an hour at this site that he stood up, glanced at the cliff behind him—and froze in astonishment. There, neatly etched on the ruddy stone, he saw

  NEMO

  1934

  For various reasons, Greg told no one except his wife about the discovery for the next eight years. Nor did he return to Davis Gulch. I felt extraordinarily privileged that he had chosen to share his find with me.

  In October 2009, Greg met writer Scott Thybony and me on the Hole-in-the-Rock Road, near the head of Davis Gulch. It was a serene autumnal day as we set off across the billowing domes and sandy hollows of the mazelike plateau that stretched ahead of us. An easy place to get lost, if you didn’t keep track of your bearings.

  Greg led us unerringly to the wall with the inscription. As soon as I saw it, I knew that it was Everett who had carved it. The orthography—the down-slanting E, the short-cropped M, the oval O—exactly matched the Davis Gulch inscriptions that had been found by the searchers in 1935. And if I thought the Grand Gulch granary lay in an obscure place—well, this nondescript wall in the middle of nowhere was beyond obscure.

  In all likelihood, Greg had been the first person ever to discover this NEMO. And Thybony and I were probably the second and third people to see it. A dazzling find in its own right, it also could be marshaled to support the idea that sometime in late 1934, Everett had left Davis Gulch to head east toward the Colorado River, perhaps crossing it at the Hole-in-the-Rock gash in the towering cliffs.

  The third tantalizing clue came from Thybony, who was working on a book part of which told the story of another young desert explorer named Dan Thrapp. After working for a year at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Thrapp set off on a mission to explore the desert, even though it was his first trip ever to the Southwest. Setting off from Green River, Utah, in November 1934, he told friends he expected to be gone for three weeks. Instead, he was on his own for three months. A search was launched for Thrapp during the same months that the searches for Everett were under way; several newspapers ran stories about both lost wanderers in the same issue.

  When Thrapp resurfaced in Bluff in the spring of 1935, he wondered crankily what all the fuss was about. He had gotten along fine by himself, pairing up with a series of strangers, some of them known outlaws. Thrapp would go on to craft a distinguished career as a Southwest historian, one of the leading experts on Apaches.

  Now Thybony told me that on the Emigrant Trail (the continuation of the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail east of the Colorado River, the route by which the Mormon pioneers had reached the San Juan in 1880), somewhere just east of Grand Gulch, sometime in February 1935, Thrapp and his companions had lost the trail in a snowstorm. They had ridden in a circle to re-find the route, and as soon as they did, they discovered the fresh tracks of a man and two pack animals—tracks that had not been there an hour earlier. But Thrapp’s party never made contact with this stranger.

  Now Scott and I both wondered: Had Dan Thrapp come within minutes of running into Everett Ruess, as Ruess headed east beyond Grand Gulch? A few weeks after Scott first told me this haunting anecdote, I was prowling around the Clay Hills Divide, looking for anything that could be linked to Everett. That low pass on the Emigrant Trail is a half-day’s journey on foot west of Grand Gulch. Instead of traces of Everett, however, I discovered a different inscription on the mud wall of an Anasazi structure inside a cozy alcove:

  Scott had not found the inscription himself, nor was he aware of Thrapp ever having left his “Kilroy was here” anywhere else on his marathon journey. After making his own visit to the ruin, Scott wryly e-mailed me, “Thanks for passing on that find. I owe you a NEMO.”

  There is no proof, of course, that the fresh prints in the snowstorm on the Emigrant Trail had been left by Everett and his burros. But the possibility is tantalizing, and if it happens to be true, Thrapp’s inscription on the wall of the Anasazi structure would give the last possible date for Ruess’s wanderings in the winter of 1934–35.

  All this, of course, may be mere wishful thinking. There is a chance that Aneth Nez saw Everett murdered, and that the poet-artist’s body still lies out there somewhere, on Comb Ridge or in Chinle Wash. But there is an equal chance that Aneth’s story was about someone else. The mystery of the vagabond who vanished near Davis Gulch in November 1934 endures.

  As Brian Ruess told me, “Everett just doesn’t want to be found.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Everett Ruess first piqued my interest when I read Bud Rusho’s A Vagabond for Beauty in the late 1980s. What put me on his trail in earnest, however, was a decision in 1998 by John Rasmus, who plucked a query about Everett from a small pile of story ideas I’d offered him for the start-up issue of National Geographic Adventure. Ten years later, Rasmus again turned me loose in the field, after I told him about Denny Bellson’s startling discovery on Comb Ridge.

  John has been my editor since 1979 at three different magazines. He remains the single editor for whom I have the most respect and admiration, among the scores for whom I have written articles during three decades of freelancing. Without his expression of interest in Everett Ruess, this book would not have happened.

  At Adventure in 2009, features editor Mike Benoist plunged into the complex story that spiraled out of the Comb with a dedication and passion that impressed me, even while I’d come to expect it as Mike’s default setting during the five years he’d served as my hands-on text editor. Equally committed to getting the best out of the story were photo editors Sabine Meyer and Caroline Hirsch, assistant editor Ryan Bradley, associate editor Mary Anne Potts, communications director Caryn Davidson, and photographer Dawn Kish.

  Back in 1998, when I first researched the disappearance of Everett sixty-four years earlier, a number of old-timers in Escalante, Utah, shared with me their priceless memories of the twenty-year-old’s brief visit in November 1934, as well as insider gossip from subsequent years about what might have happened to the wanderer. Not all of these men and women are still living, but I retain a lasting gratitude for the help given me by Melvin Alvey, Norm Christensen, Della Christianson, DeLane Griffin, McKay Bailey, Arnold Alvey, Jerry Roundy, Loy Riddle, Dan Pollock, and Doyle Cottam.


  In Salt Lake City, Bud Rusho generously shared the research that had gone into his own book about Everett, which by 1998 had become a cult classic, even while he sensed that some of my conclusions were likely to contradict his. The staff at the Utah State Historical Society gave me full access to the important collection of papers by Harry Aleson, who more vigorously than anyone else from the late 1940s until his death in 1972 had tried to solve the riddle of Everett’s fate. At his Pack Creek Ranch near Moab, Aleson’s younger crony and fellow river guide Ken Sleight shared his own ruminations about the puzzle, and gave me directions to the NEMO inscription in Grand Gulch that he had found in the late 1960s. Historian Gary James Bergera outlined for me the careful reasoning that would go into his essay “ ‘The Murderous Pain of Living,’ ” arguing that Everett might have committed suicide.

  Through much of my time in the field in 1998 and early 1999, I was accompanied by Vaughn Hadenfeldt, who runs his wilderness guide service Far Out Expeditions out of Bluff, Utah. Since I’d first hiked on Cedar Mesa with Vaughn in 1994, he’d become one of my favorite and most regular companions on strolls into the Southwest backcountry. Among all the friends I’ve ever hiked with, Vaughn has the best eye for the artifact in the dirt, the obscure petroglyph high on a sandstone wall. It was he who relocated the NEMO inscription on the Anasazi granary in Grand Gulch, far fainter by 1998 than when Ken Sleight had first found it. Vaughn shared my prowlings into Davis Gulch and out toward the Hole-in-the-Rock cleft above the Colorado River, when I thought I might be on the trail of the men who could have murdered Everett. Vaughn’s congenital skepticism served as a much-needed check to my runaway enthusiasm.

  In 2008, it was Vaughn who alerted me to Denny Bellson’s discovery of the grave site on Comb Ridge that might dovetail with the strange story told by Denny’s grandfather, Aneth Nez, about watching a young Anglo wander alone with two pack animals up and down Chinle Wash sometime in the 1930s, until one day he was chased down and killed by Utes. And Vaughn overcame my own skepticism, persuading me to look into the Comb Ridge enigma further.

  Joining Denny Bellson on the Comb, and listening to his stories, were critical to opening the apparently new chapter in the mystery of Everett Ruess. Through Denny, I met and befriended his sister, Daisey Johnson, who was the sole primary source for Aneth Nez’s story. Daisey’s courage in trying to plumb the depths of the mystery, even as she was suffering from terminal cancer, and her heartfelt compassion for the Ruess family, moved me deeply.

  Once I was fully “on board” with what seemed to be a possible new resolution of the mystery of Everett’s fate, I enlisted a host of friends and strangers over the course of a year and a half, in an effort to settle beyond a reasonable doubt the identity of the person interred in the Comb Ridge grave. Greg Child, a frequent companion of Vaughn and me on excursions in search of Anasazi ruins and rock art, got involved early, taking the only good photos of the grave site before it was irrevocably disturbed by the FBI team. Ron Maldonado, the only official who could authorize excavation of the site, took a keen interest in the Comb discovery, counterbalanced by a profoundly thoughtful weighing of the pros and cons of proceeding further.

  I got in touch with Brian Ruess, Everett’s nephew, one of his four closest living relatives. Brian and his sister, Michèle Ruess, threw themselves into the investigation, supplying me time and again with information and insights only the Ruess family were privy to. Michèle, in particular, got caught up in the search, and I cannot thank her enough for the scores of kindnesses she showered on the rest of us, as well as for her seemingly limitless fund of knowledge about everything having to do with the uncle she had never met. Although less passionately invested in our quest, Brian and Michèle’s siblings, Christella Campbell and Kevin Ruess, played vital roles in the unfolding drama. The help of the whole family was something I could hardly have taken for granted, for Everett’s nieces and nephews, like their father and their grandparents, had tracked down one false lead and imaginary sighting after another over the decades. They could well have spurned me from the start as another mad inventor of a solution to Everett’s fate.

  Once we realized we needed DNA tests to clinch an identification, Bennett Greenspan of Family Tree DNA agreed to take on the project. His generosity in trying to help us solve the case is not vitiated by the ambiguity of Family Tree’s results. Through my friend Steve Lekson, a brilliant Southwestern archaeologist at the University of Colorado, I made contact with five fine CU researchers who, without receiving a single dime in compensation, took the mystery on as their own project, spending countless hours rigorously trying to determine the truth of the case. Those five are physical anthropologists Dennis Van Gerven and Paul Sandberg, molecular biologists and DNA experts Kenneth Krauter and Helen Marshall, and statistician Matt McQueen. On several visits to Boulder, I got to like all five of these scholars, and to understand the complexity of their scientific art. When the results they were initially confident of proved erroneous, all five were devastated. In the public press, they were sometimes accused of shoddy and even corrupt work by critics who knew absolutely nothing about their science. The false result had come about not because of any pivotal errors on their part, but thanks to a glitch in a software program the company that had produced it was unaware of, and thanks to an almost infinitely unlikely match in the cranial structure of two different individuals. I am grateful to all five for their magnanimity in never blaming me for dragging them into a morass they could not have foreseen, and for staying in cordial contact long after the last thuds had been registered in the Everett Ruess blogosphere.

  Mike Coble, of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, which finally proved that the body in the crevice on the Comb was not Everett’s, exhibited the spirit of disinterested science at its finest, as he helped Krauter reexamine every step of his research on the case. Coble later went out of his way to explain to me the intricacies of his own DNA protocol.

  As the buzz mounted over our apparent solving of the Ruess mystery, all kinds of interested observers added their momentum to our push toward clarity. I am lastingly grateful to old friend Fred Blackburn, the best decipherer of historic inscriptions I have ever met, who also got emotionally involved in the search; to Richard Ingebretsen, who organized a well-attended Salt Lake City symposium about our find; to his tech assistant Justin Coles, who put together a stunning PowerPoint show; to Steve Roberts, who implanted a Ruess conference in the annual Escalante Days festival; to publisher Gibbs Smith, who shared his long thoughts about Everett; to bookseller Ken Sanders, who did likewise; to AP writer Paul Foy, who sent a number of tips my way; to Nathan Thompson, whose master’s thesis on Everett supplied valuable tidbits; to Maldonado’s colleague in the field, John Stein, who pointed out a prehistoric road just below the grave on the Comb that Vaughn and I had stared at numerous times without seeing; and to Steve Jerman, licenser in charge of Everett’s blockprints, who aided my grasp of the young man’s artistic genius. Equally valuable were several skeptics who never believed that “Comb Ridge Man” (as one of them dubbed the skeleton Bellson had found) was Everett, but who so cogently shared the fruits of their years of wondering about what had happened to the lost wanderer after November 1934. The two most lucid were Chuck LaRue and Scott Thybony, both residents of Flagstaff, Arizona, desert rats with impeccable credentials, and deep probers of the Ruess mystery.

  Out of the blue, Salt Lake City software engineer Greg Funseth contacted me and told me about an amazing find he had made eight years earlier—of a NEMO inscription perhaps no one else had ever seen since Everett had carved it in late 1934. A few months later, Funseth guided Thybony and me to the obscure site. It made for one of the most enthralling days I have ever spent in the Utah wilderness.

  Once my quest to solve the riddle of Everett’s disappearance had expanded into an effort to write a full-fledged biography of the young man, I spent many days in the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, where the Ruess Family Papers co
llection is housed. Archivist Elizabeth Rogers was a shining model of helpfulness during the hours I spent sifting through reams of letters and old documents, and her own fascination with Everett and his family gave me insights I could never have come up with on my own. I have never had a smoother, more congenial, or more professionally scrupulous working relationship with an archivist or librarian in decades of carrying out comparable research. Among Elizabeth’s colleagues, photo curator Lorraine Crouse and multimedia archivist Roy Webb were also friendly and helpful.

  At Broadway Books, my editor, Charlie Conrad, “got it” from the start. His own involvement with the saga of Everett, his many novel and provocative suggestions, his superb job of editing on matters both large and small, and his championing of the work through the inevitable pitfalls of publishing in such perilous times, renewed my faith in the worth of trying to write a book that people might actually want to read. Jenna Ciongoli, Charlie’s tireless assistant, promptly answered a hundred of my fussy little questions, and shot back at me another fifty I would have blithely overlooked had I been left to my own devices. Random House lawyer Matthew Martin sagely vetted the book, damping down some of my grumpier cheap shots but standing shoulder-to-shoulder with me when a fusillade was really needed.

  This is my tenth book shepherded from proposal to hardback on the shelves by my diligent and clever agent, Stuart Krichevsky. By now I’ve come to count on Stuart’s care and enthusiasm, and though he may not realize that I appreciate it, I also admire his integrity in bluntly telling me what won’t work in print as well as his sharp eye at ferreting out what might. I don’t think, however, that I had ever seen Stuart get so caught up in the day-by-day roller-coaster of my research. He even laid out a dragnet on the Web, and every few days he would forward me, under the electrifying heading “Google Alert—Everett Ruess,” a choice morsel of congratulation or diatribe from the farthest precincts of the cult republic made up of Ruess devotees.