Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Hunt, Nick

Hunt, Nick

Nick Hunt is the author of three travel books, most recently Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes (2021), a work of gonzo ornithology and a shortstory collection. He is also co-director of the Dark Mountain Project. You can hear him in Episode 42 of our podcast, discussing the travel writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor with Artemis Cooper.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

article by, [78] 42

Browse articles

20230601093028 Nick Hunt on Everett Ruess, Slightly Foxed 78

Wilderness Years

Nick Hunt on Everett Ruess, A Vagabond for Beauty

Somewhere in the badlands of Utah is a canyon called Davis Gulch. Centuries ago, the Ancestral Pueblo carved a dwelling in its rock, now inscribed with the words ‘NEMO 1934’. This is the last known signature of the vagabond Everett Ruess. The epithet ‘vagabond’ was his own, and rarely has the term been so richly deserved. An aspiring artist and writer from a bohemian home in Los Angeles, Ruess set out at the age of 16 on an uncompromising quest to seek out beauty and solitude in the rugged wilderness of the American south-west. Over the next four years he travelled the mountains, deserts and canyon-lands of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, alone but for the company of his burro and occasionally a dog. At the age of 20 he disappeared. ‘NEMO’ might have been a reference to Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – another notable seeker of solitude – or else the Greek for ‘No Man’, as employed by Odysseus.

Buy related issues of Slightly Foxed


Buy related books or goods

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.