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Everett Ruess was twenty years old when he vanished into the canyonlands of southern Utah, spawning the myth of a romantic desert wanderer that survives to this day. It was 1934, and Ruess was in the fifth year of a quest to record wilderness beauty in works of art whose value was recognized by such contemporary artists as Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston. From his home in Los Angeles, Ruess walked, hitchhiked, and rode burros up the California coast, along the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and into the deserts of the Southwest. In the first probing biography of Everett Ruess, acclaimed environmental historian Philip L. Fradkin goes beyond the myth to reveal the realities of Ruess's short life and mysterious death and finds in the artist's astonishing afterlife a lonely hero who persevered.

Poets, American --- Explorers --- Discoverers --- Navigators --- Voyagers --- Adventure and adventurers --- Heroes --- Discoveries in geography --- Ruess, Everett, --- 20th century artists. --- american artists. --- american disappearances. --- american legends. --- american mystery. --- american southwest. --- american west. --- ansel adams. --- art history. --- artist biography. --- crime. --- criminal investigation. --- depression era art. --- dorothea lange. --- edward weston. --- great depression. --- historical disappearances. --- history. --- into the wild. --- mysteries of the west. --- mysterious death. --- mystery and adventure. --- southwestern history. --- unsolved disappearances. --- unsolved mysteries. --- utah artists. --- utah history. --- utah mysteries. --- vagabond artists.

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Twenty-five years ago Philip L. Fradkin read a book about a remote bay on the Gulf of Alaska coast. The noted environmental historian was attracted by the threads of violence woven through the natural and human histories of Lituya Bay. Could these histories be related, and if so, how? The attempt to define the power of this wild place was a tantalizing and, as it turned out, dangerous quest. This compelling and eerie memoir tells of Fradkin's odyssey through recorded human history and eventually to the bay itself, as he explores the dark and unyielding side of nature. Natural forces have always dominated Lituya Bay. Immense storms, powerful earthquakes, huge landslides, and giant waves higher than the world's tallest skyscrapers pound the whale-shaped fjord. Compelling for its deadly beauty, the bay has attracted visitors over time, but it has never been mastered by them. Its seasonal occupants throughout recorded history-Tlingit Indians, European explorers, gold miners, and coastal fishermen seeking a harbor of refuge-have drowned, gone mad, slaughtered fur-bearing animals with abandon, sifted the black sand beaches for minute particles of gold, and murdered each other. Only a hermit found peace there. Then the author and his small son visited the bay and were haunted by a grizzly bear. As an environmental writer for the Los Angeles Times and western editor of Audubon magazine, Fradkin has traveled from Tierra del Fuego to the North Slope of Alaska. But nothing prepared him for Lituya Bay, a place so powerful it turned one person's hair white. This story resonates with echoes of Melville, Poe, and Conrad as it weaves together the human and natural histories of a beautiful and wild place.

Violence --- Natural disasters --- Natural history --- History. --- Fradkin, Philip L. --- Travel --- Lituya Bay Region (Alaska) --- alaska. --- animals. --- coastal. --- environmental history. --- environmental. --- explorers. --- fishing. --- fjords. --- gold mining. --- gulf of alaska. --- historian. --- human history. --- indians. --- indigenous people. --- lituya bay. --- memoir. --- natural features. --- natural history. --- natural world. --- nature. --- northern united states. --- settlers. --- small town. --- tourism. --- tourists. --- true story. --- violence. --- visitors. --- western united states. --- world history.

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Philip L. Fradkin, one of California's most acclaimed environmental historians, felt drawn to the coast as soon as he arrived in California in 1960. His first book, California: The Golden Coast, captured the wonder of the shoreline's natural beauty along with the controversies it engendered. In The Left Coast, the author and his photographer son Alex Fradkin revisit some of the same places they explored together in the early 1970's. From their written and visual approaches, this father-son team brings a unique generational perspective to the subject. Mixing history, geography, interviews, personal experiences, and photographs, they find a wealth of stories and memorable sights in the multiplicity of landscapes, defined by them as the Wild, Agricultural, Residential, Tourist, Recreational, Industrial, Military, and Political coasts. Alex Fradkin's expressive photographs add a layer of meaning, enriching the subject with their distinctive eloquence while bringing a visual dimension to his father's words. In this way, the book becomes the story of a close relationship within a probing study of a varied and contested coastline.

Coasts --- Natural history --- Fradkin, Philip L. --- Fradkin, Alex --- Travel --- California --- Description and travel. --- History.