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...
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, <i>California: The Golden Coast</i>, captured the wonder of the shoreline’s natural beauty along with the controversies it engendered. In <i>The Left Coast</i>, the author and his photographer son Alex Fradkin revisit some of the same places they explored together in the early 1970s. From their written and...
