Utah very much

The state deserves its star role in Western movies, finds Ben Borland

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Utah is a dry state, right? Both in terms of its desert landscape and its strict approach to alcohol. Both these positions, as it turns out, are somewhat wide of the mark. In fact, I discovered that Utah is both wet AND wild!

Water, or at least the signs of water at work on the landscape, are everywhere you look. Two mighty rivers, the Green and the Colorado, flow through the state and they have carved a patchwork of canyons deep into the red rock.

And the wet stuff has helped to create the famous scenery that has made Utah such a go-to location for filmmakers; the buttes and mesas (table-topped hills), along with the strange and otherworldly arches and hoodoos (thin spires of rock).

This is cowboy country, instantly recognisable as the backdrop for countless Westerns, many of them made by John Ford and starring John Wayne.

"For millions of people, this landscape IS the Wild West, even though the caption on the screen might say Wyoming, South Dakota or Arizona," says Brian Hunnings, general manager of Red Cliffs Lodge, where the Colorado River makes a sweeping curve below 2,000ft cliffs. Built around the old White's Ranch, where Ford and The Duke shot Rio Grande with Maureen O'Hara in 1950, this is a place where you can fulfil your childhood ambition to live the cowboy (or cowgirl) life in the most luxurious of surroundings, with a fine restaurant, swimming pool and riverside cabins.

Hollywood even paid for the road to the ranch to be paved, and today the River Road (or Utah State Route 128, to use its proper name) is one of the most scenic drives in the world. The arrival of silver-screen royalty also transformed the nearby mining town of Moab.

"Cisco was the county seat but unlike Moab it didn't have a hotel," explains Brian.

Today, Cisco is a ghost town and Moab is one of the world's great destinations for outdoor holidays.