Hollywood legend Robert Redford, who died Tuesday in his Utah home at age 89, was known for iconic roles and films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, as well as launching the now-famous Sundance Film Festival. But before he hit it big in show business, Redford had quite a different gig, far from the bright lights of Hollywood, working for a brief time at Yosemite National Park. He said he was inspired to work there after a chance visit as a child, when his mother took him on a trip there to aid in his recovery from a life-threatening illness.
“It all started when I was about 11, growing up in Los Angeles,” Redford said in a 2016 interview with Smithsonian magazine. “I had a mild case of polio—not enough to put me in an iron lung, but enough to keep me bedridden for weeks. As I came out of it, my mom wanted to do something for me. She realized that, growing up in the city, I’d missed out on a lot of nature.”
Redford said his mother drove him to Yosemite—an over four-hour trip—in 1949, when the National Park Service was just 33 years old. The experience proved transformative for the future Oscar winner. “So she drove me to Yosemite. If you’re coming from Fresno, you go through a mile-long tunnel, and when we came out the other side, I was blown away,” Redford said. “We stopped to look at the view, and when I went to the edge—well, I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to look at this. I want to be in this.'”
