Most wilderness aficionados recognize the name Everett Ruess. He is remembered for his amazing wilderness wanderings and his ultimate mysterious disappearance among the red-rock canyons of the Colorado Plateau. In this later role especially, he has been the subject of much speculation and several books.
Fewer think of Ruess as a Sierra traveler, yet in the calendar year prior to his presumed death in 1934, Ruess spent the entire season in the High Sierra, most of it in Sequoia National Park. Ruess’s journal from that summer provides both a window into the young man’s soul and a fascinating glimpse of life as it was lived in the high country in the early 1930s.
Leaving behind his family home in Southern California, Ruess arrived in Three Rivers in late May 1933. Amazingly, considering that he had already spent several summers wandering in the wilderness of the Southwest, Ruess was only nineteen years old. His mother had taken him camping in Yosemite when he was nine years old, and he had immediately taken to the wilderness. They returned several times, and by the summer of 1930 the now-sixteen year old boy began to take overnight hikes by himself.
Ruess, still only sixteen, graduated from Hollywood High School in January 1931 and, despite the misgivings of his parents, he struck out on a solitary trip into the vastness of the Navajo Indian Reservation of northern Arizona. Traveling on foot across the huge reservation with a burro, Ruess spent months among the still largely traditional people who lived there at that time. The following summer he continued these wanderings.
Ruess had already demonstrated considerable artistic talent, and these Southwestern trips produced sketches, woodblock prints, and watercolor paintings, which Ruess sold or traded along the way for camping supplies.
It was with this background that Ruess arrived at Sequoia National Park in May 1933. His brother dropped him off at the ranch home of local packer and cattleman Earl McKee (father of the current rancher of the same name), and for the next week Ruess enjoyed cowboy life while he made arrangements to purchase two burros – “Grandma” and “Betsy.”
Leading his burros, Ruess walked up the Colony Mill Road into the park on May 30th, arriving in Giant Forest on June 1st. He had picked a wet year to come to the Sierra, and for the next month, Ruess wandered the western reaches of the park waiting for the high altitude snow to melt. He made his base camp at Lodgepole and spent much time in the company of seasonal ranger Lon Garrison and his wife Inger. (Garrison would go on to a long and distinguished career with the NPS.
During this period, Ruess and his burros explored a Sequoia National Park that no longer exists. The Generals Highway had not yet been completed to General Grant National Park, and the northwestern quarter of Sequoia remained a true wilderness. Often in the company of rangers or maintenance workers, Ruess made trips to still-frozen Pear Lake and explored the Clover and Dorst creeks country, spending time at the ranger patrol cabins at Clover Creek Crossing and (upper) Cabin Meadow. Before he was done, he also followed the Black Oak Trail to Muir Grove and Hidden Spring. At times, he complained about hearing in the distance the explosives being used to blast the highway through the region. Today most of the trails Ruess enjoyed are abandoned and long overgrown.
Finally, on July 7th, Ruess headed east on the just-constructed High Sierra Trail. His was the first stock party to make it over Kaweah Gap that season. For the next month, he made a giant loop through the eastern half of the park, visiting the Kern Canyon and climbing Mt. Whitney. He even made a quick trip over Harrison Pass to visit Lake Reflection in the Bubbs Creek country, which he found too busy for his taste. By the beginning of August, Ruess was back at ranger Garrison’s camp at Lodgepole.
Ruess’s account of that month describes a High Sierra far different from our own. Most of the parties he met traveled by pack train, and in that old-time world of ranchers’ hospitality, Ruess had no trouble collecting the supplies he needed from these groups. His journal brims with shared meals and campfire stories.
Finally, after losing a week to a bad episode of blood poisoning caused by an infected cut on his hand, Ruess started north for good on August 12th. Again, he headed east on the High Sierra Trail, but this time he cut off to the north via Elizabeth Pass into the Sugarloaf Country that was then still under Forest Service management.
Wandering through the Kings Canyon backcountry, he spent time with Andy Ferguson, crossed over Sphinx Pass, and checked out the Rae Lakes country, where he “borrowed” some corn starch from the Shorty cabin at Woods Creek. Descending to Paradise Valley, where he met Poley Kanawyer, Ruess took the old cutoff directly from Paradise to upper Copper Creek and headed north via Simpson Meadow, Le Conte Canyon, and Muir Pass. He left modern Kings Canyon National Park on September 13th at Paiute Creek and, moving fast now, arrived in Yosemite Valley on October 2nd via the John Muir Trail.
The following spring, Ruess returned not to the Sierra but to Utah, where he wandered mysteriously and sometime in the fall of 1934 disappeared for good. His body was never found.
We remember Ruess for his almost mystical appreciation of Utah’s red-rock wilderness and his disappearance there, but before that happened Ruess enjoyed and recorded his adventures during a magical summer spent mostly in Sequoia National Park. That story, too, should not be lost.
© Wm. Tweed