Everett Ruess was born in 1914 and grew up in a Unitarian minister’s family that moved often before settling in Los Angeles. As a teenager he began spending months at a time alone in the wild: the Sierra Nevada, the California coast and, from about 1931, the canyon and mesa country of Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado. He traveled with a burro or two, slept out, made block prints and watercolors that he traded or sold, and wrote long, intense letters home. Along the way he met the photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. His parents largely funded the trips.
What happened
In the autumn of 1934 Ruess arrived in Escalante, a small Mormon town in Garfield County, Utah, and spent some days getting to know local people. His last letters, sent to his brother Waldo and his parents in mid-November, said he would be out of touch for a while and had no wish to return to civilization soon. He then headed southeast toward the canyons of the Escalante River with two burros. Nobody is known to have seen him alive after about November 20.
His family was used to long silences, but by early 1935 his mail was coming back uncollected and they wrote to the Escalante post office asking for help. A county commissioner, H. Jennings Allen, organized local men to search. In Davis Gulch, a narrow side canyon of the Escalante, they found the burros alive but starving in a brush corral that Ruess had evidently built. Nearby, cut into the rock, were the word NEMO and the year 1934. His parents later suggested it stood for the Latin word for no one. Of Ruess himself, and of the journal he kept that year, there was no sign.
The investigation
Several searches followed through 1935, including one that enlisted a Navajo tracker, who concluded that Ruess had walked into Davis Gulch and not walked out. A search plane later flew the country between Lees Ferry and Escalante. Nothing more was found. The usual explanations were a fatal fall while scrambling to cliff ruins, a flash flood, murder by cattle rustlers who might have taken the stranger for a government agent, or a deliberate departure to start again somewhere else. Much of lower Davis Gulch was later drowned by Lake Powell, which began filling behind Glen Canyon Dam in 1963.
The case revived in 2009. National Geographic Adventure published an article by the writer David Roberts reporting that a skeleton had been recovered from a rock crevice on Comb Ridge near Bluff, Utah, about sixty miles from Escalante. A Navajo family’s account held that a Navajo elder had seen Ute men kill a young white traveler there for his animals and had hidden the body. At the University of Colorado Boulder, the anthropologist Dennis Van Gerven found the skeleton consistent with Ruess in age and size and overlaid the skull on his photographs, and the biologist Kenneth Krauter reported a DNA match with Ruess’s nieces and nephews. The story went around the world.
It did not survive the year. Utah’s state archaeologist, Kevin Jones, questioned the identification from the start, arguing that the teeth showed wear typical of a Native American diet; dental records were later found showing fillings the skull lacked. The family sent bone samples to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, which found they did not match the relatives and were probably not from a person of European ancestry. In October 2009 Krauter withdrew the result, blaming software designed for larger, less degraded DNA samples. According to later accounts, the military lab subsequently matched the remains to a missing Navajo man, Joe Santistevan, and they were returned to the Navajo Nation.
The explanations
With Comb Ridge ruled out, attention went back to Davis Gulch. The writer Scott Thybony, in a 2016 book, followed up a report from the 1970s of human bones wedged in a crack in the canyon, some of which were handed to park staff and then lost. He also described a small, hidden campsite near a NEMO inscription. The historian Andrew Gulliford has called this the most convincing answer so far, but it has not been confirmed by any physical evidence.
Where it stands
Utah’s Bureau of Criminal Identification lists Ruess as a cold case. His letters and journals have been published several times since 1940, and he has become a patron figure for wilderness wanderers. What became of him after November 1934 is unknown; the one time the mystery was declared solved, the science was wrong.