Well, that does it for Sundance. The 10-day festival lasted through the first weekend and was packing up by Tuesday.   Sundance and Park City grew up together, sort of like siblings, and they didn’t always get along. There’s no denying Sundance made Park City famous years before skiing made Park City famous (and decades after silver had made Park City famous and then forgotten).  In the early years, it filled a deathly slow spot in the ski season, putting people in hotel rooms and restaurants. It was always a great time to ski because the mountain was deserted. That changed through the years, though ski traffic still has a Sundance slump. Nothing wrong with that, says the local skier.  As the festival grew, it attracted a lot more people. There were parallel film festivals and back alley showings. There were all the usual camp followers and  lots of media coverage looking for great stories or embarrassing scandals. Sundance, the official part, was pretty well-run and even a bit buttoned down. The side show was a circus.  The end result was a huge impact on the town.  It became too big, too crass, and just too much. After the great plague, Sundance scaled back. Local room rates got so high that festival patrons were staying in Salt Lake City, so more of the screenings moved down the canyon with them. It really never fully came back after Covid, which is maybe OK.  But the decision to move to a bigger locale seems to make sense for both Park City and Sundance. On Saturday, I joined some friends to go geek at Sundance on Main Street. It was mid-afternoon when we got to the overflowing Richardson Flat parking lot. The shuttle bus was uncomfortably packed with all manner of humanity and a virus from every corner of the globe. It took nearly an hour to get to the Main Street transit center. The express bus stopped several times along the way.  Main Street wasn’t packed, but it was plenty busy. It was pure Sundance, with crowds of people all wearing black and the most amazing assortment of winter shoes I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure how people could walk in some of them. Of course, there were also the open-toed high heels. The cowboy hat stores seemed to be doing a booming business.  We walked up to the top of Main and turned around. My friend made the observation that there were a couple of thousand people on the street where there was absolutely nothing happening. They were all watching other people watch other people watching nothing. Including us. “Nothing to see here,” and yet in its own way there was a lot to see. A Kardashian moment.  If Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were out and about, we missed them. Maybe they were inside getting fitted for cowboy hats. They were at the Eccles Sunday for the premier of a movie they produced about Girl Scout cookies. About time Harry found work.  The number of sponsor exhibits and temporary store fronts (“activations”) was way down from the last time I visited Sundance — which was before Covid. Years ago, people would leave Main Street with bags of free junk. Not this year. There was a long line to get into a temporary building hosted by Acura. Not even the people shivering in line knew what was inside. But it must have been cool because people were lined up all the way to the transit center.      After a lap up and down, we started looking for a place to get a cup of coffee and warm up before braving the bus back to reality. In Swede Alley, we stumbled on to something that made the whole trip worth it. There was a cutaway of a yellow VW bus from the movie “Little Miss Sunshine.” We could stand behind it and get our pictures taken waving out the window of the famous bus, followed by a free hot chocolate and fresh doughnut. No one could explain why they were promoting a movie that came out 20 years ago. But it drew a big crowd. We were about to get on the Richardson Flat bus with half of the Western Hemisphere when one of the group suggested we get on the Deer Valley bus instead. The plan was to take the Deer Valley bus to Snow Park, then transfer to the Deer Valley/Richardson Flat bus that would probably be empty. We got lucky, and the express had made a detour to the transit center.  The return to Richardson Flat, in gridlock, was like the driving scenes from “The Italian Job.” The driver pushed that bus through the traffic in ways I would not have thought possible, changing lanes, cutting off Range Rovers, and politely pausing for people to make left turns at Ironhorse. Then pedal to the floor.  He was a man on a mission. I think the return to Richardson Flat took seven minutes from the roundabout. There were all of a half dozen people on the bus, and we all congratulated the driver on his performance. But that was the last Sundance. I’ll only sort of miss it, but it will definitely leave a hole behind. In the end, I think “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Napoleon Dynamite” were worth all the chaos. Goodnight, Sundance. Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986. The post More Dogs on Main: Goodnight, Sundance appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less