The Druid Arch in Canyonlands National Park. Image courtesy of Flickr user terratrekking

Whenever my brother John tells me he’s planning a trip, right away I start angling to go along because he likes places no one else would think of, usually backpacking destinations in the great outdoors. It doesn’t hurt that he has the necessary gear and skills. I doubt I’d know how to pitch a tent or light a camp stove if it weren’t for John. When we pack up in the morning, he stands over me like a Marine, making sure I shake out the ground cloth before I fold it up.

In the car on the way we don’t need the radio; we pass the time arguing, usually at high volume.

I drive the highways, then he takes over on dirt roads, bombing over sand traps and potholes while I shriek. He hates things to go smoothly; when they threaten to he puts an edge on the adventure by telling me we might be low on gas or lost, a stratagem that made me insist on turning back halfway to the isolated Maze District of Canyonlands National Park. Both of us vividly remember the episode, forever defining us as travelers: I’m the wuss, he’s the nut.

But that’s another story. This one’s about the best trip we ever took, to Fish and Owl Creeks in the badlands of southeastern Utah. How John found out about the 16-mile loop trail on BLM land descending about 1,500 feet into a pair of narrow canyons that scrawl across an otherwise empty space on the map I do not know. He’s got a secret file folder full of such expeditions, I guess.

We reached the trail head about 50 miles north of Mexican Hat with afternoon shadows lengthening over the plateau, known as Cedar Mesa. That’s mesa, not butte; if you don’t know the difference between the two, you’re too much of a greenhorn to tackle Fish and Owl, which should not be attempted by inexperienced hikers, according to a map we got from the BLM. The trail is rough and hard to follow, marked chiefly by cairns; water is intermittent; and if something bad happens, help is not at hand.

For all these reasons, I advocated camping on top that night and starting out the next morning. But John overruled me, herding me into Owl Creek like a goat boy. We had to scramble down big boulders—me mostly on my tush—before reaching the bottom of the canyon, which narrows as it descends. Occasionally, I took my eyes off the trail long enough to appreciate the view at our shoulders of precariously stacked hoodoos and Cedar Mesa sandstone cliffs. Meanwhile, John was ever on the lookout for Anasazi rock art and cliff dwellings said to be hidden on benches above the creek.

By the time we finally stopped and set up camp, I was feeling surprisingly comfortable in the wilderness. John made freeze-dried lasagna for dinner and invited me to drink as much bottled water as I liked, thereby lightening the load; no problem when we ran out, he said, because—yum, yum—he’d use his purifier to treat the brackish water we found in sloughs.

I slept tight that night, blinking my eyes open to see a dark sky full of stars when I rolled over in my bag.

The next day’s hike took us deeper into Fish and finally to its confluence with Owl, where we turned downstream. Owl had stretches of running water, small hanging gardens and sandy shoulders where the path was easy to follow. I was ambling along when I realized my brother had stopped, bending over the trail where he’d found a mountain lion track.

Or were things just going along too smoothly for John? I bet on that.

We doubled back at one point, in search of a natural arch described on the map, but never found it. A mile or so short of the exit back onto the mesa, by which we’d close the loop, we found a second campsite, ringed by cottonwood trees, close to a flowing section of the creek. I took a dip, dried off in the sun, and figured I’d found paradise in a crack below Cedar Mesa.

A freakishly cold winter coated Rome's Colosseum in snow. Image courtesy of Flickr user Michele Cannone.

When a storm dumped eight inches of snow on Rome this winter, I pored over photographs of the coated Colosseum, Forum and Piazza San Pietro, thrilled to reports of Romans shoveling streets with wooden spatulas, and above all wished I’d been there to see it. My friends in Rome reported frustration over coping with the deluge, and while there were no fatalities, the storm snarled traffic and stunned a city that thinks it only rains in winter. It made me remember the old story about how the site for Rome’s Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore was chosen when the Virgin Mary appeared to Pope Liberius on the night of August 4, 352, telling him to build a church where a patch of snow appeared the following morning. Santa Maria della Neve, as the basilica was originally called, duly rose on the Esquiline Hill, ever after the scene of an August 5 pontifical Mass celebrating the miracle.

Snow when you least expect it—divine apparitions notwithstanding—always seems a miracle to me, even when it wreaks havoc for travelers. My brother and I once went back-roading in northern Baja’s Parque Nacional Sierra de San Pedro Mártir. Stuck in a four-wheel drive vehicle on a rutted track leading toward 10,157-foot Picacho del Diablo, we set up camp, hoping to hike out for help the next morning. It had been a beautiful, sunny day, warm enough for shirt sleeves, but that night it snowed, leaving the two of us to shiver in front of a feisty little campfire until morning.

We’d forgotten a simple truth of geography and meteorology: the higher the elevation, the more likelihood there is of snow, in any season. It doesn’t take a genius to know that, but I forgot again on a trip to the Canary Islands, where I’d gone seeking sunshine while living in Europe a few winters ago—not an outlandish plan given that the Spanish archipelago is 100 miles off the coast of Africa at about the same latitude as the Sahara Desert.

My plane landed late at night on the main island of Tenerife, where I rented a little tin can of an economy-class car and set off for the Parador de las Cañadas del Teide on the flank of 12,200-foot Mount Teide, a 40-mile drive from the airport.

Up I went on a switchbacking road through lush forests of Canary Island pines that eventually yielded to ground-hugging broom and juniper, crossing razor-back ridges lined by steep precipices that offered heart-stopping views of lighted towns on the coast below.

Then it started to snow, at first softly and prettily. Alone on the road, I counted my blessings to be there to see it. But the dusting thickened and soon I was driving through whiteout conditions. I couldn’t believe it, but kept creeping along, eyes straining, fists glued to the wheel as the windshield wipers fought vainly against the onslaught and the car skidded. When another vehicle finally came by, headed down the mountain, I pulled over, flagged it down and hopped in the back seat, abandoning the rental to a snow bank and myself to the kindness of strangers. My saviors were a young man and woman who gave me a drink of good Spanish red wine to calm my nerves and ultimately deposited me in a hotel on the coast. I awoke the next morning to balmy blue skies, wondering if I’d only dreamed of snow. But the rental agency told me I was lucky to have made it down the mountain because the Teide road was closed, meaning I had to wait another day to reclaim the car in a tow truck.

Memory, which has some of the same white-washing propensities as snow, has resolved the nightmarish events of that night into an amazing adventure. I still tend to forget that winter is a frequent visitor at high elevations. And finding myself in snow when I least expect it will always seem to me the same kind of miracle that told a fourth-century pope where to build the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

Snow on Tenerife's Mount Guajara in the Canary Islands. Image courtesy of Flickr user Cestomano.

A view from the train on the way to Tibet

In 2006 when the People’s Republic of China started railroad service from Beijing to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa—a 2,525-mile route cresting at 16,640-foot Tanggula Pass—people like me got in line. Though critics have seen it as yet another means for China to despoil Tibet’s cultural and mineral riches, I was studying Mandarin in Beijing and I couldn’t pass up the chance to take the railroad trip of a lifetime. I did think about waiting because I’d heard there were plans for a luxury version of the train, managed by Kempinski Hotels, with private-bath suites, elegant dining cars and window-lined lounges.

Then spring break came around and I couldn’t wait any longer. I flew to Lhasa and got a train ticket back to Beijing in a four-berth soft sleeper; it had pressed cotton sheets, pillows, comforters, TV monitors with headsets and oxygen canisters for victims of altitude sickness. All quite congenial at first. But it’s a 40-hour trip, so conditions deteriorated along the way (especially in the restrooms). At mealtime, passengers filed into the dining car for unappetizing food or bought noodles on the platform during brief stops.

I’d have been miserable, but every time I found myself wishing for a cup of coffee or a hot bath, all I had to do to raise my spirits was press my nose to the window. The first day we crossed the Tibetan Plateau, which looks like Utah with Alaska on top. Nameless ranges of snowcapped peaks passed by; fur-clad villagers stared at railroad crossings and yaks bolted off the tracks. The Chinese government spent millions to cross the plateau by rail, piping liquid nitrogen through the tracks to keep them from buckling during a thaw and building underpasses for wildlife.

I fell asleep after a 30-minute stop in the lonely mining town of Golmud, then woke the next morning in the heart of the Middle Kingdom, decorated with sunshine and cherry blossoms. I remember passing through Xi’an, home of the terra-cotta warriors, before tucking in the second night, followed by wake-up the next morning at Beijing’s West Station.

In retrospect, I’m glad I made the trip when I did because the 5-star Beijing-Lhasa train is on what looks like permanent hold. Fifty percent owned by the flush Chinese electronic company Huawei, it’s still being touted. But Kempinski has bowed out and the perhaps too fast-and-furiously growing Chinese railway system has suffered setbacks: to wit, an accident last July on a new high-speed line in eastern China that killed 43 people and the imprisonment of the nation’s railway minister, suspected of graft.

So don’t wait for amenities on the railroad that crosses the Middle Kingdom to the Tibetan Plateau. Question your soul about the political correctness of taking a PRC train to embattled Tibet. And then, if you ask me, go.

A pre-flood view of Vernazza. Image courtesy of Flickr user OaklandNative

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano’s recent visit to Vernazza—one of five villages along Liguria’s fabled Cinque Terre coast—signaled a comeback for a region devastated by flooding and mudslides last fall. On October 25, 2011, the delicate and precious little Cinque Terre, strung along approximately ten miles of heavenly Italian littoral between the towns of La Spezia and Levanto, received a pounding 20 inches of rain that turned streets into raging rivers, filled homes and businesses with debris, swept away mudslide barriers and obliterated sections of the beloved coastal path that connects the hamlets of Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore. In Vernazza, three people died and the village was temporarily evacuated. After the disaster it seemed unlikely that spring and the visitors it brings would ever return to the Cinque Terre.

But spring has come, along with crimson poppies on the shoulders of the Via dell’Amore path. Vineyards that cling to steep cliffs overlooking the Ligurian Sea are greening, promising a fine fall harvest of the grapes used in the region‘s sweet, golden Sciacchetrà wine. Olive trees are unfolding, ready for their annual pruning. Work to rebuild the damaged villages and erect protective mudslide barriers continues, but many townspeople have moved back into their homes and businesses have rushed to reopen for the spring tourist season.

One of the happiest chapters in the story of Cinque Terre’s renewal is the effort made by three American women—Ruth Manfred, Michele Lilley and Michele Sherman—longtime Vernazza residents, to get the news out about the disaster and raise funds for relief. Shortly after the floods, they launched Save Vernazza ONLUS, a not-for-profit organization that has received almost $200,000 in donations to be used for rebuilding Vernazza’s historic center, restoring the scenic trail system and replacing the dry stone walls that are an integral feature of the landscape. Beyond rebuilding, the hope is to promote sustainable tourism in the heavily visited Cinque Terre. “We are making Vernazza more beautiful than before,” Mayor Vincenzo Resasco said, though I don’t know how that could ever be so.

Starting from Montorosso, I walked the via dell’Amore 20 years ago, before the Cinque Terre became an Italian national park and Unesco World Heritage site. It was early spring and I had the whole coast to myself, it seemed. Near Vernazza I climbed onto a boulder just above the sea to work on my tan, then lunched in Corniglia, filling my canteen with leftover wine to take me on to Riomaggiore. That day exists in my memory like one of those old colorized photos that give the places they depict an air of fragile permanence. Let’s hope that, come wind and rain, that air persists in the Cinque Terre.

An ocotillo flower, courtesy of Flickr user Martin LaBar

Temperature: 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Sky: blue. Breeze: light.

Those were the idyllic conditions when my family and I visited California’s Joshua Tree National Park. Summer time is a different story, of course, with temperatures across the 550,000-acre park where the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts meet routinely over 100.

It takes singular personalities like Edward Abbey and Mary Hunter Austin to love desert places. My family must have the right genes.

Stuffed into a rented Toyota Camry, we entered Joshua Tree from the north and hiked the one-mile Hidden Valley loop. In the isolated canyon once favored by cattle rustlers, it’s said, we talked to a ranger about pinyon pine trees (bearing the nuts used in pesto sauce), watched rock climbers suspended along one of the geometrically-fractured joints that cross-hatch Joshua Tree cliffs, and picnicked in the shade of a Mojave yucca. Then it was on to Barker Dam (built around 1900 to create a reservoir for livestock); the boulder heaps at Jumbo Rocks; and 4,500-foot Sheep Pass leading east toward the wide, hazy Pinto Basin.

When we finally reached Cottonwood Springs we learned that torrential rainfall the previous September had flooded the road, closed trails, campgrounds and the visitor center on the south side of the park. Consequently, we couldn’t hike to Lost Palms Oasis visited by desert tortoises and bighorn sheep. But on the way out of the park we got a surprise; my niece Sarah saw it first.

“Stop!” she cried from the back seat.

I thought she’d chipped a tooth on trail mix, but it turns out she‘d seen ocotillo, miraculously blooming in winter. We pulled over and piled out to inspect about two dozen tall, spiny ocotillo plants pointing flame-red fingers into the sky. They usually bloom in the spring; in fact, March is the month for wildflower viewing in Joshua Tree. But September rains had apparently fooled them, presenting us with a gift on a delightful day in the desert.

The Acela trip between New York and Washington has many great scenic views. Image courtesy of Flickr user John H Grey

Over 1.5 million people take the train between New York and Washington every year. Some do it so often it almost doesn’t seem like traveling. They get on and zone out; three hours later—actually two hours and 45 minutes on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela Express inaugurated in 2000—they’re in D.C.

But 225 miles of scenery lie between the Big Apple and our nation’s capital along tracks once operated by the venerable old Pennsylvania Railroad that run roughly parallel to Interstate 95.

Next time you take the train keep your eyes open. There are plenty of sights to see:

1. All aboard at Penn Station, New York, the slap-dash modern terminal below Madison Square Garden, a far cry from beautiful Beaux Arts Grand Central (celebrating 100 years of service next year).

At Penn you have to close your eyes to imagine what it was like when it was built of pink granite in 1910 with a waiting room modeled on the Baths of Caracalla. Its demolition in 1963 was lamented by architects, including Yale’s Vincent Scully, who wrote, “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”

2. The New York Jets and Giants play football at the Meadowlands near the mouths of the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers. Passing by on the train you wouldn’t know that the 20,000-acre wetland is infamously polluted, the perfect place for Tony Soprano to dump dead bodies. Instead, you see high reeds and water channels visited by snowy egrets and Peregrine falcons—indications that the natural wonders of the region may get a second chance, thanks to an ambitious plan mounted by the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission.

3. The Acela train doesn’t stop in Trenton, New Jersey’s capital. But you’ll know you’re there when you see the big neon sign on the steel-framed Delaware River Bridge. With 9-foot high capitals and 7-foot high lower-case letters, it says, “Trenton Makes—The World Takes.” How‘s that for grandiosity? But back in 1935 when the present sign was erected (replacing an earlier version affixed in 1911) there was truth in the claim. Trenton was a major industrial center, producing steel, rubber and linoleum.

In 1776, George Washington crossed the Delaware River nearby for a surprise attack on English-employed Hessian soldiers garrisoned in Trenton. As the train goes over the river about 10 miles southeast of McConkey’s Ferry Inn (now the Washington Crossing Historic Park), it’s worth remembering how he and his ragtag Continental Army turned the tide of the revolution that snow-stormy Christmas Day at Trenton.

4. You get a fine view of the skyline as the train approaches 30th Street Station, Philadelphia. If the windows opened you might even hear monkeys chatter and elephants trumpet because the track goes right by the gate of the Philadelphia Zoo, American‘s first, opened in 1874.

On your way out of town watch for Victorian Boathouse Row, a National Historic Landmark on the east bank of the Schuylkill River, still a major rowing center that holds a big regatta on the Fourth of July.

5. When you reach Wilmington the train passes close to Old Swedes Church, built in 1698 by Scandinavian immigrants who came to the Delaware River delta before English Quakers settled Philadelphia. With a mossy, old cemetery said to be haunted, the church still celebrates Swedish St. Lucia’s Day in early December.

6. There’s fine open duck-hunting country south of Wilmington and you get your first real look at the Chesapeake Bay as the train crosses the mouth of the Susquehanna River at little Havre de Grace.

7. Then it‘s on to Baltimore where mostly all you see are the thick granite walls of the 7,000-foot long Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, built in 1873.

8. Little foretells the train’s arrival in Washington, D.C., a city with almost no skyline, its uncontested high point the 555-foot top of the Washington Monument.

Collect your belongings as you pass through the grimy train shed at the back of Union Station, then disembark into Neo-Classical glory, thanks to an Act of Congress that mandated restoration of the terminal in 1988. The front door is better than the back, opening directly onto the U.S. Capitol.

The view from the Dirt Mulholland. Photo by Susan Spano.

It’s L.A.’s Yellow Brick Road, a show-stoppingly scenic route along the backbone of the Santa Monica Mountains, 55 miles from Dodger Stadium to Malibu, where it swan dives into the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, Mulholland Drive passes precariously-perched mid-century modern castles in the hills, the Hollywood sign and the Hollywood Bowl, L.A.‘s own Mount Olympus, the Getty Center, the hippie hamlet of Topanga Canyon, trailheads in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, abandoned lookouts for the Army’s Nike anti-aircraft missile system and reservoirs built by the L.A. Department of Water and Power headed from 1886 to 1928 by the man who gave the road its name: William Mulholland. An Irish immigrant and self-taught engineer, he brought water from the High Sierra to the once bone-dry San Fernando Valley north of L.A.

Photo by Susan Spano

When I first moved to Southern California in 1998 I got to know the lay of the land by driving Mulholland, which is not for the faint-hearted. Seldom more than two lanes wide, it has more hairpin curves, steep climbs and downward glides than a roller-coaster, along with L.A. Basin and San Fernando Valley views that will kill you if you takes you eyes off the road long enough to look at them.

At the time, a little-known 8-mile stretch of Mulholland starting just west of the 405 Freeway was drivable, but unpaved—remarkable given its route across one of America’s most densely-populated regions. A few years ago a group partly spearheaded by actor Jack Nicholson tried to get Dirt Mulholland on the National Register of Historic Places. The effort came to naught, but Dirt Mulholland still rambles in the tracks of coyotes through the stony, chaparral-covered heart of the Santa Monica Mountains, turning down the volume on L.A. so you can hear birdsong.

So on a recent trip to L.A. I was surprised to discover that Dirt Mulholland is now closed to motor vehicles due to damage from El Nino rains over the last decade.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing if you ask Paul Edelman with the Santa Monica Mountain Conservancy, a California state agency established in 1980 that has helped to preserve over 60,000 acres of wilderness and urban parkland, including many contiguous to Dirt Mulholland. With cars and motorcycles banned, it’s now the province of hikers, mountain bikers and wildlife.

In January I drove up Topanga Canyon Road from the Ventura Freeway, wandering through suburban subdivisions until I found Dirt Mulholland’s western threshold. Soon the houses petered out, as did the pavement, but I kept going until I reached a yellow gate where a lone bicyclist was strapping on his helmet. There I got out of the car and walked to a precipice from which I could see the old dirt track winding across the hills, headed back to Lalaland.

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip.

If I’d known that The Trip, released last summer and now available on DVD, was a buddy movie I probably never would have rented it. But, of course, the title snagged me and I’m glad it did because it‘s a classic road flick, with a couple of endearing twists.

Directed by Michael Winterbottom and first released as a BBC2 television series, “The Trip” starts with British funny men Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (as themselves) taking off in a Range Rover for a culinary tour of the North Country. Coogan, who is writing up the excursion for The Times of London, planned to take his beautiful young girlfriend along, but when she cancels he asks his old friend Brydon. Both are actors and compulsive competitors whose dueling Michael Caine impressions and escalating battles for the best bon mot cannot disguise deep insecurities that make them immeasurably more likeable than the pair of losers who embark on a California wine-tasting tour in the 2004 movie Sideways.

As in any good road movie it’s about the journey, not the destination: recitations of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the English Lake District, en route sing-alongs (including a Coogan-Brydon rendition of Burt Bacharach’s vocals from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and strange encounters with small, tall portions of gourmet food. In one sequence especially beloved by fans the guys riff on a line from what could be Shakespeare: “Gentlemen to bed for we rise at daybreak“ becomes “Gentlemen to bed for we leave at 9:30.”

Their routines ensue amid glorious North Country settings. When I wasn’t laughing I was remembering my own trips there, once hiking from barn-to-barn in the Lake District National Park, another time waiting out a downpour on 1,167-foot Honister Pass above Lake Buttermere. But the scenery is secondary in the movie, a world-class backdrop for human chatter and obsession that forms a satirical arch over the proceedings and puts The Trip on my short list of memorable road movies. My all-time favorites?

• Frank Capra‘s 1934 comedy It Happened One Night, starring Claudette Colbert as a runaway heiress tailed by reporter Clark Gable. Who could ever forget her teaching him how to thumb a ride?
• Two for the Road, directed by Stanley Donen in 1967, with Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn falling in love on a trip through the French countryside and then retracing their steps 10 years later to keep their marriage alive.
• Ridley Scott‘s Thelma and Louise, from 1991, which has Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis headed for oblivion in the Great American Southwest.

Martin Sheen in "The Way"

The Way, a new movie written and directed by Emilio Estevez, starring his father Martin Sheen, had me from the moment the main character arrives in St. Jean Pied de Port, France, to identify the body of his son who has died in an accident while traveling. It’s a sad set-up, to be sure. But what really got me was the Pyrenees Mountains scenery around the town where pilgrims begin the 500-mile walk to the shrine of St. James in Santiago de Campostela, Spain, resting place of the apostle’s remains, discovered after he was martyred in Jerusalem in 44 A.D.

For people who have dreamed about walking the Camino, the film is the next best thing, not only because of its glorious Pyrenees and Spanish Basque country setting, but because it dramatizes the emotional and spiritual journey pilgrims inevitably take, regardless of religious affiliation. Sheen plays an irascible, lapsed-Catholic ophthalmologist from Southern California. Others join him on the journey, each with his own mission. Together they follow the route, getting their official Camino passports stamped in hostels where they stop as they gradually discover truer, deeper reasons for walking the pilgrim’s path.

In real life Sheen, well known for playing President Jed Bartlet on the TV series “The West Wing,” is a devout Catholic and the father of four children, all of them actors. Emilio, his oldest, got the idea of making the film on a family car trip in 2005 roughly paralleling the Camino. He wrote the lead role for his father and based the story partly on a book by Jack Hitt, Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain.

I won’t give away what happens along The Way, except to say that one of the things Sheen’s character learns is why his son loved to travel, and that every trip taken with an open heart can be a pilgrimage.

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Image courtesy of Flickr user 2thegalapagos

The artist and adventurer Everett Ruess was 20 years old when he vanished into wild and lonely Davis Gulch, a drainage of the Escalante River in southern Utah. He’d been tramping alone for 8 months across some of the roughest, most isolated country in the nation with burros to carry his gear and the odd volume of Emerson. Occasionally he stopped in settlements like dusty little Escalante to pick up mail from his parents. Two sheep herders reported meeting him on the slick rock tableland outside town on Nov. 21, 1934. Then nothing.

The woodblock prints and writing he left behind, collected in W.L. Rusho‘s 1983 Edward Ruess: Vagabond for Beauty, still captivate wilderness lovers. But it’s the mystery of his disappearance that has made him a cult hero among backpackers, climbers, canyoneers and other desert rats. Did he fall from a cliff while looking for arrowheads? Could he have committed suicide or been murdered by cattle rustlers? Or, drawn as he was to the blank spaces on the map, did he engineer his own disappearance, intentionally leaving family, friends and civilization behind?

His strange story—part cautionary tale, part siren song—has been told many times by Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and other writers. Jon Krakauer found similarities between Ruess and Chris McCandless, the subject of Krakauer’s 1996 bestseller Into the Wild. This year a new book, Finding Everett Ruess, by David Roberts, adds another chapter to the Ruess riddle.

The book landed at the top of my reading list not because I’m a fan; to my mind Ruess’s evocations of the desert Southwest lack cultural and historical perspective. But I have been to Davis Gulch, now part of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and there’s nothing lacking about that. Hiking in from its confluence with the Escalante was an unforgettable experience, not to be repeated anytime soon because access is dictated by the water level on Lake Powell, which has risen since then, backing up into tributaries like Davis Gulch.

But a drought that peaked in 2005 made it possible for my brother John, backcountry ranger Bill Wolverton and me to explore the gulch, starting in flats of quick sand at its mouth. Farther up the canyon we saw 75 foot high La Gorce Arch and squeezed through a subway where the canyon walls narrow before leaving Davis by the livestock trail at its head, presumably the route Ruess took down.

Roberts went the same way to research a 1999 article for National Geographic Adventure that revisited the mystery, uncovering new hints about the possible murder of Ruess by Escalante locals.

But 10 years later the writer heard of a skeleton buried in a crack along Comb Ridge some 50 miles east of Davis Gulch in the Navajo Reservation. Tests on a DNA sample suggested that the remains were those of Everett Ruess, causing Roberts and fellow investigators to re-imagine the wanderer’s last steps, hypothesizing that he must have left Davis Gulch, crossed the Colorado River to die in the isolated northern part of the Navajo Reservation. But the findings, published in National Geographic Adventure, had to be retracted when a state-of-the-art U.S. military lab determined that the Comb Ridge bones were not those of Everett Ruess.