"Most of what follows is true." That's the opening of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," the 1969 movie about two bandits born as the sun was setting on the Old West. Morally ambiguous, the movie struck a chord with Vietnam War-era audiences who stood and cheered when Paul Newman as Butch and Robert Redford as Sundance met a hail of bullets in a Bolivian town, etching the final frame onto my 15-year-old heart.
The movie wrote something else there, as well: a love of Western scenery, which I rediscovered on a recent trip to southern Utah.
With five national parks, Utah's grand scenery is unrivaled in North America. It's also where Robert LeRoy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, was born in 1866.
On the Parker homestead in the Sevier River Valley 200 miles south of Salt Lake City, Butch learned how to be a cowboy. - Cleveland.com
