The open road and the Southwest, especially Utah, are never out of my thoughts.  Spring and Fall are the best times to visit the desert.  [Photos Max Vollmer, Click on any image to enlarge]

Young adventurer and lover of wild places , Everette Ruess, disappeared without a trace  in 1934.   He was last seen camping in Davis Gulch south of Escalante, UT.  His remains were not discovered until 2008 near Comb Ridge, northwest of Bluff, UT.   I’ve been reading Ruess’s letters and journal entries in A Vagabond For Beauty by W. L. Rusho.  I can relate to his  efforts to reconcile himself with the civilized world around him when he was in the wild one.  Camped on the side of Navajo Mountain in the desert Southwest on June 7, 1934, he wrote this:  “I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it.  Always I want to live more intensely and richly.  Why muck and conceal one’s true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover one’s self.  It is true that in the world such lack of reserve usually meets with hostility, misunderstanding, and scorn.  Here in isolation I need not fear on that score, though the strangers I do encounter usually judge me wrongly.  But I was never one to be content with less than the most from life, and shall go on reaching, and leaving my soul defenseless to attacks.”