Way Out There: Adventures of a Wilderness Trekker

the desire to face the unexpected in a wilderness environment; to live by my wits; and, in the process, I hoped to develop higher levels of skill, intuition, and confidence. I was drawn to these types of challenges. I found them compelling and, as I got older, increasingly difficult to resist. I’d had my share of adventure. The

I needed to go someplace that would test my accumulated knowledge and proficiency in the backcountry.

TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH. NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA. THOU SHALT NOT RETURN, ’CAUSE “THE WEST IS THE BEST.” AND NOW AFTER TWO RAMBLING YEARS COMES THE FINAL AND GREATEST ADVENTURE. THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN

The difficulties I had encountered were superseded by stirring memories of the vastness, remoteness, silence, and incredible beauty of this pristine wilderness.

like best is that I am alone and living an invigorating, drastically simplified existence where all of my earthly possessions are on my back and I have only myself to depend on. By late morning I had begun the steady

At eighteen, in a dream, he saw himself plodding through jungles, chinning up the ledges of cliffs, wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams. The peculiar thing about Everett Ruess was that he went out and did the things he dreamed about, not simply for a tw