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

The young adventurer and lover of wild places, Everett Ruess, disappeared seemingly without a trace in 1934.  He was last seen in Davis Gulch, southeast of Escalante, UT, but his body was finally found in 2008 still further south on Comb Ridge, a few miles west of Bluff, UT.  Comb Ridge, is a steep ridge running due north from the San Juan River.  After reading Ruess’s letters to friends and family, found in Everett Ruess, A Vagabond For Beauty, by W. L. Rusho, I can relate to his  efforts to reconcile himself with the civilized world whenever he was alone in the wild one.  Camped on the side of Navajo Mountain in San Juan Co., UT, 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.”

For more on his disappearance, murder, and discovery of Ruess’s remains 84 years later, see https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-may-02-sci-ruess2-story.html