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ranged from Pacific Islands wildlife refuges to Turkish shipwrecks, photographed the trail over six months, with emphasis on the primordial nature of the landscape. The ride itself, which comprised a team of five men and three women, was managed by Boren, using fresh horses at well-spaced staging posts across the Continental Divide as well as occasional four-wheel drives to lug equipment. Among the riders, selected by Redford, were Oregon-born Dan Arensmeier, a former East Coast Xerox manager who had abandoned big-city life for the ways of the West, and his wife, Sherry; Terry Minger, a conservationist and town manager of Vail, Colorado; naturalist Ed Abbey; and Redford’s Sundance-based friend Mary Whitesides, an artist. Redford, Boren, the Arensmeiers, and Blair and his wife and assistant, Arlinka, rode the first part of the trail from Barnum, a site east of the Wild Bunch’s cliff-side Hole in the Wall hangout, through the Andrew Wyeth–like flats of Wyoming and across the Wind River Mountains to the mining town of Atlantic City, where they joined up with Minger. Ten days later, crossing the most difficult mountain terrain into Utah, they met up with Abbey and his wife and Whitesides.

National Geographic would publish a thirty-six-page feature on the ride in November 1976, and later a lavishly illustrated book. In both, Redford retold the Butch Cassidy tale, dressing it with the personal motivation for his current activism. Every phrase from the native cowboy’s lips is relished—“Head out to that juniper, turn left, go west to the Rocky Mountains and may the Good Lord bless your skies”—and every opportunity is taken to acknowledge the dignity of the Indians, the lost stewards, and the cavalier governing of the Bureau of Land Management. Since the early seventies Redford had abandoned his diary keeping and replaced it with stapled-together notebook jottings titled “Redford Musings,” which became the foundation for essay and book. In one notebook he scribbled: “Maybe it’s because of our future rush, our need to expand and grow at any cost, but we have lost something, something vital, something of passion and romance.”

“Everything I wrote I truly felt,” he says now. “I was saying, ‘Look at how fast it’s slipping away.’ What we did to the Native American was reprehensible. But it’s not over. We’ve poisoned reservation lands in Arizona. Soon, if the energy companies have their way, we’ll do the same in Utah. All so that Californians can enjoy hot tubs and neon lights. I came off that ride more determined than ever to kill Kaiparowits.” Shortly after, he would write to Arensmeier about the emotional impact of the ride: “It was as if some supernatural force plucked us from our daily harness and gave us a glimpse of greener valleys.”

Throughout the ride he was reminded of how tired he truly was. He had accidentally packed Jamie’s sleeping bag, which was too small to cover him in the freezing nights: “Every morning I woke up feeling a track meet had taken place on top of me. It wasn’t so much the physical hardship of the trip that wore me down. It was the background: the work overload.”

But in the spring, it all seemed worthwhile. Shortly after the airing of a forceful segment of the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes hosted by Dan Rather, which Redford had personally orchestrated, Cal Edison announced it was abandoning Kaiparowits in the face of environmental impact reports. Ted Wilson believed Redford deserved enormous credit for the victory: “Of course, there were many people involved, many voices. But it was because of him that Rather came south and the whole business became nightly news. No matter how you cut it, no one else in the locality—neither Wayne Owens nor I nor anyone—could have garnered that interest. Bob simply deserves the credit for mobilizing ordinary people and blocking Cal Ed from abusing this state.”

The rewards weren’t all sweet. On April 22, the Southern Utah News published an article headlined “Rally Ends in Hanging, Burning of Environmentalists,” with accompanying pictures of effigies of Redford, Mayor Wilson