SALT LAKE CITY - Everett Ruess - promising writer, watercolorist, block-print maker, and chronicler of the wilderness - was only 20 when he disappeared in the remote Red Rock country of Southern Utah. He was never seen again. Did Ruess die accidentally, falling from the rim of some canyon, or did he simply decide to vanish and start life over again somewhere else? Did he kill himself? Or was he murdered?

The adventurer-aesthete - who wandered alone with his two burros through the American Southwest, became friends with photographers Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange, swapped prints with Ansel Adams, and left behind 175,000 pages of journals, letters, and poems, plus a hundred watercolors - vanished in 1934, almost 70 years ago. The Ruess mystique - initially promoted by his parents and the editor of the California-based Desert Magazine - began shortly after his disappearance and has been growing steadily over the years. Now, the Los Angeles artistic prodigy is casting a spell on a new generation.

Last month, the Salt Lake City publishing house Gibbs Smith released a lavishly illustrated hardcover combination edition of Ruess's work, including 33 block prints, titled Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty & Wilderness Journals. Since 1983, Gibbs Smith has sold nearly 100,000 copies of paperback editions of Ruess's letters and wilderness journals. In the past three years, there have been two films about Ruess's life: Dianna Taylor's Vanished!, which aired on the Turner Broadcasting System in 1999; and Diane Orr's documentary/docudrama Lost Forever: Everett Ruess, which premiered last November before an audience of 1000 at Salt Lake's Masonic Temple in conjunction with an exhibit of Ruess's possessions and artwork at a local bookstore. Adventure writer Jon Krakauer devoted a chapter to Ruess in his 1996 bestseller Into the Wild (Villard Books), describing him as "cut from the same exotic cloth" as his doomed hero, Christopher McCandless. Cambridge-based author David Roberts is currently proposing to write the lost adventurer's biography.

Suddenly, what Salt Lake City bookseller Ken Sanders calls "Ruessitis" seems to be spreading like desert tumbleweed. Take generous portions of Thoreau and John Muir, add a pinch of Kerouac, Rimbaud, and maybe James Dean, and the result is an irresistible cult figure. It is a story that has almost everything: a tortured hero cut down before his prime, wanderlust, adventure, hints of homosexuality, and intimations of a violent end. It features a Hollywood "stage mother" - Stella Ruess, a disciple of Isadora Duncan, who took her son to the edge of the Grand Canyon where she made him pledge to be an artist. Environmentalists fighting to save Utah's Red Rock Wilderness from mining interests have taken up the young wanderer as well, with Ruess's block print of himself and his two burros serving as the logo for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

"It's the stuff of legends," says Gary James Bergera, a Salt Lake City editor who wrote an afterword to On Desert Trails, a reissue of the original 1940 collection of Ruess's writings. Adds filmmaker Orr, "People are very emotional about Everett. It is a yes-or-no thing. His appeal is to throw everything to the wind and go. We live in a cautious society. There is a longing for something. He expressed it." Orr's own son caught the Ruess "bug," heading off at age 16 to the Uinta mountains, east of Salt Lake City, on a six-week trek with his dog.

Just how good a writer or painter Ruess might have been, had he not vanished, is a matter of dispute. W.L. "Bud" Rusho, the editor of Ruess's journals and letters, concedes, "If he hadn't disappeared, he might have been forgotten." To novelist and Western historian Wallace Stegner, Ruess's writings were "barbaric adolescent yawp." And his prose unquestionably tends towards the grandiose and self-dramatizing, with phrases like "I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear" and "Alone I shoulder the sky and hurl my defiance and shout the song of the conqueror to the four winds.... I live!"

Others argue that his writings have greater lasting value. "What is important about Everett is that he was the first modern appreciator of the Red Rock Canyon wilderness," says Gibbs Smith, of the Gibbs Smith publishing house. "He was the first person to see it through spiritual or aesthetic eyes. No one has described the Red Rock country better. He had the ability to see with a clairvoyant eye the special quality of that landscape."

Even those put off by the excesses of his prose have been impressed by the breadth of his travels. "He was fearless," says would-be biographer Roberts. "Some of the places he went to are really remote, even now. And to do it solo in the 1930s!"

Ruess's wanderings began when he hitchhiked to Arizona's Navajo country shortly after his graduation from Hollywood High School, in January 1931, at the age of 16. Except for a stint at UCLA in the fall semester of 1932 and six months in San Francisco in the winter of 1934, Ruess spent almost all his time in the mountains of California and the four-corners region of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, hiking through the backcountry of Zion National Park, the Canyon de Chelly, Mesa Verde, and the Grand Canyon at a time when those places were far less accessible than they are today. He traveled with almost no money - his parents would send him $5 and $10 checks - bringing only his burros, camping gear, journals, and paints. He spent his time hiking through sandstone canyons, exploring cliff dwellings, and immersing himself in Navajo culture and customs.

Although he remained close to his family, his writings show him becoming increasingly alienated from the middle-class, artistic milieu in which he had grown up. "As to when I shall revisit civilization, it will not be soon, I think," he wrote in his last letter to his brother Waldo in November 1934. "I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the street car, and the star-sprinkled sky to the roof, the obscure and difficult trail leading into the unknown to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here where I feel that I belong and am one with the world about me?"

In November 1934, Ruess left the town of Escalante, in Southern Utah, heading south toward the Colorado and San Juan Rivers and to Navajo country. He wrote his parents and told them not to expect to hear from him for two months. A week later, he spent two nights at the camp of two sheepherders, telling them he was heading toward Glen Canyon to do some sketching.

When his parents' letters to him were returned unclaimed, they became alarmed. A March 1935 search party found Ruess's two burros in Davis Gulch, in the Escalante. Searchers also found the word NEMO, believed to be Ruess's inscription, scrawled on a rock in the same canyon. Nemo means "no one" in Latin. It also may be a reference to Captain Nemo, the hero of Jules Verne's 1872 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, who is also an idealist seeking escape from civilization. (Ruess reportedly read the book several times.) However, the searchers failed to find the young man's body or personal effects. Some months later, the Salt Lake Tribune sent out its crack investigative reporter to look for signs of Ruess. He came back empty-handed as well.