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SUNDANCE - This resort's namesake film festival is under way and its rooms are virtually all booked, but from the sparse crowds on the ski slopes, it looked like just any common winter weekday.
Nope, Sundance ski area was not a daytime hangout last Friday for film stars trying to chill out before mixing with the masses congregating in Park City for evening screenings. But it was a most pleasant, sunny place to escape the gray inversion plaguing lower valleys and to carve turns on well-groomed runs still holding their own despite more than a week without any new natural snow.
Any celebrity sightings in the base village's Foundry Grill?
"Not really. Just Bob," said hostess Angela Matson, referring to resort owner and film festival founder Robert Redford.
Ian Lowndes, a landscape architect from Brisbane, Australia, has been hanging around Sundance since just before Christmas, becoming fairly familiar with the place while honing his snowboarding skills.
He got a sense of the film festival buzz when he drove up from Provo: "There's a few people in the car park with nice tweed coats," he observed. But, otherwise, he had the place to himself as he sat alone outside Bear Claw's Cabin, an eatery on the ski resort's highest ridge, while sketching the skyline dominated by Mount Timpanogos.
As regulars in a Sundance ski group for senior citizens, Glenn McGettigan, Ray Huffaker and Larry Giles have seen a few celebrities through the years. "We've seen Redford bring people up," said McGettigan. "They stop a lot on the way down, talk and take pictures."
Ski school supervisor Donna Knudsen said that in her 15 years at Sundance, the film festival has "never given a lot of business to the mountain. The people who come and stay at Sundance are here to see films, not necessarily to ski."
That's just fine with Mike McLinden, of Island Heights, N.J. He was reluctant to talk about how good the snow was, fearing it might attract bigger crowds than what he typically has seen in 25 years of skiing at Sundance - and taking in movies at night with his old college buddy, Richard Nance, of Cedar Hills.
"We can kill two birds with one stone," said Nance.
"But mostly we ski," said McLinden.
For Canadians Dan and Patricia Braniff, from Collingwood, just north of Toronto, Friday's sunny setting was the kind of day they love. He got in a few ski runs; she took in the ambiance at Sundance's base village and checked to see what movies they might try to see later in the week.
"I do love the atmosphere here," she said.