THE STORY OF SUNDANCE MOUNTAIN RESORT

Well, I guess it all started with a simple ride over 50 years ago, and I'd taken a side road and come up through this canyon, which is called Provo Canyon, where everything is kind of very tight, narrow, and confined, and then suddenly the landscape just opened up, and I saw this majestic view of a giant mountain. I guess I knew this was where I wanted to put a stake in the ground, and it was idyllic because it was so raw and kind of primitive, which made me fall in love with the whole canyon. A few years later, when I could afford it, I bought two acres of land for $500 and built a cabin for my family. But change is inevitable, so it was just a matter of time before this whole beautiful area was going to be discovered. I realized it would be developed away from what I loved. At that point, I pledged to do everything in my power to preserve it, and I guess that was the birth of Sundance Mountain Resort. So we built a tree room restaurant early on centered around a 65-foot pine tree, and I wanted the interior to resemble something modern with sort of an artistic look, and I had been inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's Talesean West and its north parapet wall. It kind of had the appearance of an artist's palette, and I was really taken with it, so I decided to employ that here at Sundance. And then Sundance became a place where I could meld my two loves of nature and art, and I realized if I could do that with some sustainability, then it could become a legacy for people that love the area. So the amphitheater became a place where that vision came to life, and its unique stage and song performances have been a staple here now for decades. Other resorts have had more money than I did to build bigger things, but there was a human quality that was missing, a love of the land, a feeling of the land. If you put a root deep enough in the ground, what blossoms will inspire others to come. So what's at the core of Sundance? What's the flame that started any of this? It's about storytelling. I came from a storytelling family, and my life has been about storytelling from the beginning, and the history of Sundance is a story to be told. When I was young, I would read books at the library, and they were always about a world that was bigger than the one I was growing up in, and I love being able to feel like I had a window to a larger world. There are very few phrases more thrilling to me than once upon a time, and I can't imagine any child that doesn't feel the same way. My hope is that everyone who experiences Sundance will feel like they have a glimpse into that larger world, and that they'll come away with their own story to tell.