The Wrong Turn That Built Sundance
Near Provo, Utah
Robert Redford was driving across the country sometime in the late nineteen fifties, heading from California toward the University of Colorado, when he took a wrong turn into Provo Canyon. He did not correct course. He drove up into the canyon and kept going, and what he found there, the narrowing walls, the fall colors, the stream running alongside the road, the mountain rising at the end of it, he did not forget.
In nineteen sixty-one, he came back and bought a two-acre lot in what was then called Timp Haven for five hundred dollars. He built a small cabin there with his own hands. He was still a relatively unknown actor at that point, years away from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
By nineteen sixty-eight he had bought the entire Timp Haven ski resort, which had been operating since at least nineteen forty-four, and renamed it after the character he was about to make famous. Sundance became a resort and an idea. In nineteen eighty-one, Redford founded the Sundance Institute at the base of that mountain, a nonprofit to support independent filmmakers.
The Utah Film Festival, which had started in Salt Lake City in nineteen seventy-eight, moved to Park City and eventually came under the Sundance umbrella in nineteen eighty-five. By the nineteen nineties, the Sundance Film Festival was the most important showcase for independent film in the country. All of it, the institute, the festival, the name, started with a wrong turn up a canyon.
The mountain was waiting.
