wandering: sundance

Saturday dawned grey and smoggy (a-g-a-i-n!!! but a big storm is supposed to be coming next week ...) so we dragged along all morning, waffling about what we wanted to do.  We checked all the canyon web cams on the NOAA web site and confirmed that it was overcast everywhere, not just down here in the inversion, and immediately succumbed to fair weather hiking sydrome.  Instead, we threw the dog and the gazetteer into the car and drove south to check out Sundance Resort in beautiful Provo Canyon, just north of Provo.

Provo Canyon is a big canyon, with a major road and a big ol' river (the Provo River, as you might imagine) winding through it.  The road is quite twisty and the scenery is dramatic: big mountains falling away into sheer cliffs which are made up of many layers of rock, some pushed skywards in impressive formations.  There are lots of waterfalls in Provo Canyon as well - H suspects there are as many "Bridal Veil Falls" in Utah as there are "Mud Ponds" in Maine ... which may or may not say something about the respective states' populations - and we saw a bunch of crazy folks ice-climbing on the canyon walls.  Ice-climbing is something I suspect I'll never do - it's just too nuts.

We did notice right away that even an hour south, in the shadow of the largest mountain in the Wasatch Front (Mt. Timpanogos, around 12,000'), there still isn't very much snow.  The second thing we noticed was how adorable little Sundance Resort is!  Tucked up in the canyon, two or so miles up from the main canyon, the ski mountain has 450 acres, 3 chairlifts and one "handle tow."  The front mountain is all beginner and easy intermediate trails; the back mountain has the bigger blue trails and all the expert terrains, including some steep bowls that, had there been snow, would have been full of powder.

All the buildings are subtle, one or two stories at most - and a couple of yurts too - and folks find their way around via quaint signposts.  There is no hotel per se, but about 100 units' worth of cabins; there's a whole arts scene, including single-session workshops for jewelry-making, pottery, painting, print-making and photography, and a glass-blowing studio; they show films for the Sundance Film Festival, and have summer theater and lots of live music; there are a couple of nice restaurants; and there's a tiny little bar (of course), the Owl Bar which Robert Redford brought down from Wyoming where it had been since the 1890s and where the Hole in the Wall Gang actually used to hang out.  We stopped in for a couple of beers and a chat with the bartender, a transplant from Philadelphia who spent his childhood summers running around Vinalhaven.  Small world, wherever we go.

Since it didn't look like ol' Bob Redford was going to be stopping in any time soon, we left after our beers (reminding ourselves to come back in the summer: a little creek runs through the center of the resort and I just bet it's gorgeous when the leaves are on the trees and the sun is out) and made a loop of our day trip, swinging up through Heber City to Park City and returning to SLC via 80W.  The murk was still sitting there in the valley when we got back, but it was nice to get out of the thick of it for a little bit, even if we didn't get cloud-free skies.