A sad RIP to David Roberts

I had read about his initial throat cancer diagnosis, and his energy-sapped recovery. I had read about people criticizing him on his first trip to the Southwest after that, talking about him not being just snippy but downright angry.

However, if you read this 2018 piece at Backpacker by him, you'll realize how much he was sapped, and how much he realized that, and maybe rethink, if you were one of the people who downgraded his book after that trip.

Because, after that, as the piece noted, the cancer metastasized.

Seeing Backpacker rerun it (even, weirdly, without an editor's note), I ventured a guess and hit Google. And yes, last week he died.

I first came to know him through "In Search of the Old Ones." Like Mark Reisner's "Cadillac Desert," it's a book I've not only read, or not only re-read, but re-re-read. I'm not sure if it's been more than three times, but it probably has.

Unlike Stephen Lekson and others whose books on Chaco I have, he wasn't a professional archaeologist or anthropologist. He was originally, out of a college, an A-class mountaineer who  did some pioneering trails at Denali and elsewhere. Then, he became a professor, focusing in teaching outdoor writing, and more and more of that, in expanding his horizons and adding to his own books, led him to the Southwest.

You can tell that he listened, listened a lot, and listened well, to old-timer Anglos, whether professionals or not, who knew "where to head" for truly special finds but also had a "code" of never fully revealing their location. Roberts internalized that, and in his own way, parallel to but different from Ed Abbey and Jim Stiles, came to loathe the hordes overwhelming the greater Four Corners. (He definitely differed from Stiles in that he didn't kiss Mormons' asses.)

Growing up in Gallup, New Mexico, yet being taught relatively little about this world around me by my parents — one trip to Chaco, one trip to the then Bisti Badlands, and nothing to Canyonlands, in nine years, for example — he was a sort of mentor to me. I'm not a professional mountain climber, nor that level of equivalent as a hiker. I have never through-hiked anything with water stashes. Yet, in part due to him, I've done a certain amount of putzing around on Cedar Mesa and in and near Grand Gulch. (My footprints there at right.) I've seen a few sites that are enough off the beaten path that I saw nobody else while hiking out or back in.

Thank you.

I read several other of his books, some of which were more about hiking and less about Anasazi, and others that were more about Indians, but peoples other than the Hisatsinom, as the Hopi call the Old Ones. That piece is by Craig Childs, one of Roberts' two best-known mentees as an author along with Jon Krakauer. It was a sidebar to a long story at High Country News (back when it was much better than today) by Childs.

As for Roberts' books, to get back to that? I grokked his sequel to "In Search of the Old Ones," titled as "The Lost World of the Old Ones" and reviewed here by HCN. It didn't quite grip me as much ...

His book on the Pueblo Revolt, main-titled "The Pueblo Revolt," was great for telling us as much about what we don't know, and even more about why we don't know some things and likely will. His book on the disappearance of Everett Reuss, "Finding Everett Reuss," was just fantastic, a non-fiction "whodunit" with twists and turns. (BUT ... WRONG on the ending.)

"Sandstone Spine," reviewed here, was about Roberts, with two friends, hiking the length of Comb Ridge (a first for Anglos or Spanish, and probably period) as his way of working through a midlife crisis.

"Once They Moved Like the Wind" is surely the best basic-level overview of the final Apache wars.

Finally, among those of his I've read fully, there's "Devil's Gate," an honest look at the tragedy of the 1856 handcart trek, a tragedy inflicted on the Mormon trekkers almost entirely by Brigham Young himself, a tragedy he tried to cover up as well as his part in it, in a cover-up second in Mormon history only to the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

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Update: First, per his CaringBridge website, this is how he died. And, David was as honest in dying as in living, as people who knew him in person have long attested. In refusing an oxygen mask, and being told the result, he said, yes, he would "die." He didn't use "pass," unlike hospital staff. He then dictated a last entry to his wife Sharon, per the end of the piece. 

He was also honest about being an atheist, another kudo. And, also honest about the bullshit of the alleged power of positive thinking. (That said, that piece has some people, like BLM rangers at Kane Gulch, claiming Roberts, contra his claims in "In Search of the Old Ones," HAS revealed too much. Personally, while acknowledging it's plausible, among his various takedowns, I remain less than fully convinced Peary cheated on the North Pole.)

 

I wouldn't suggest this publicly to Sharon, but I hope she does something like Ed Abbey's friends did. Bury his body or scatter his ashes somewhere on Cedar Mesa.

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Update two: Per the "wrong" on Everett Ruess, I'm going to have, at some point in the near future, a much more complicated retrospective. It is not going to be a "takedown," though I can do those, as I did somewhat with Ruth Bader Ginsburg (why did she never go by her actual first name, "Joan," anyway?) or fully so with the likes of John McCain. But, there's other things that need to be addressed as well as that — though his reaction to botching the Ruess ending and how he reacted are both ... symptomatic.)

 

And that "more than" is here.