Sure, you glitzy Hollywood types hear the word Sundance and go all ape about January in Park City.

I know.

But some of the rest of us know it means something more.

All those years ago when Robert Redford was a struggling actor with a young family and a wife from Utah, he bought some land up on a mountain, with a ski resort.  Timphaven.  To some, not much of anything, just a piece of real estate on the side of a sleeping Indian woman, Timpanogos, dusted in snow much of the year.  Timp.  Not much to some, up a canyon, Provo Canyon, the river running, Bridal Veil Falls tumbling.   A winding road going over the Alpine Loop, golden aspens in the fall, mystical winds, the high and the dry, the midsummer flowers. 

Sundance.

Once there was just a little lodge there, not much, some food, nothing fancy, come-and-get-it place, then the Tree Room, then so much more, gift shops and bars and restaurants and gourmet food and cabins.

We used to go up there for the summer theater, Gypsy or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or whatever, sit on the lawn above the rest, and listen to Will Geer recite looking like he just stepped out of Jeremiah Johnson, bohemian and rugged and ruddy next to a very red-haired red-faced Redford.  

In college it was a place to escape for an afternoon, Indian summer, take a stack of Nietsche or Kierkegaard and read and ponder and meditate and melt away.  Seventies.  John Denver on the tape player in the car.  Rocky Mountain High.  

I close my eyes and see Porsches driving away, Rovers coming down the hill, gates and summer homes.

And aspen.  Summer flowers. 

 

One late summer's day a few years ago my husband and I were hosting a party there, aunts, uncles, cousins, extended family, all coming up the mountain to have a barbeque and go to the summer theater, but the mountain was on fire, so we had to head them off at the pass where the road turned off the canyon, take them all to another venue in town even though there was a football game that day and we didn't think we'd find a restaurant who could take all those people on short notice and serve up forty steaks at the flick of a hat.  But it happened.  Because the mountain was on fire.

You might think Sundance is Park City in January.  Celebrities and films and the Egyptian Theater and Zoom and the Kimball Art Center.

But it's so much more.  

So much.

On the Web:

Sundance Resort

Sundance Film Festival 2010  - January 21-31, 2010 - Park City, Utah

Classic Festival Moments - Robert Redford on Sundance 

Robert Redford bought a couple of acres of land up a mountainside in Utah in 1969 for $500, and Sundance was born.  The Sundance Film Festival followed in 1978, moving to nearby Park City in 1981, and is now the largest independent film festival in the United States.  Sundance 2010 opens today in Park City, Utah, and runs through January 31st. . . up the road a piece from my Sundance.