As I write, it’s the day before I leave for a long ski weekend in Telluride. It’s also the day before the start of the Sundance Film Festival. Coincidence? It’s more like strategery. Like many Parkites, I can’t wait to get the hell out of Dodge.

The phrase “Get out of Dodge,” originated in Dodge City, Kansas, back in the 1870s, when that town was as wild and wicked as they come. Ruled by two of history’s most feared “peace officers,” Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, the admonishment to “get out of Dodge” was what you did if you knew what was good for you. Getting out of Dodge became synonymous with leaving some place or some situation that was about to become uncomfortable, to say the least.

Like the next 10 days of Sundance, for example. With the mind-numbing traffic, the virtual takeover of every bar and restaurant in town, the hordes of people crushing cigarette butts on the sidewalks, the Hollywood hangers-on tripping up the Main Street slush in Manolo Blahnik fur boots, who can blame us for leaving? Park City, our quaint, little mountain town, suddenly morphs into an obscene filmmakers’ Disneyland that makes us want to escape from tomorrow ASAP.

It all kind of makes me wonder what the OG Sundance dude, the Kid himself, thinks of all of this? The Sundance Kid haunted my dreams when I was growing up in the ’70s. That brooding, long-distance stare. That lock of dirty blond hair falling over the mysterious brow. The black hat, bushy sideburns and thick, dark mustache that threatened to close shop on the sunburned beauty of that face. As if that was even possible. Forget the posse of relentless lawmen chasing him and Butch Cassidy across the Utah desert — all I ever wanted to know was “Who is that guy?”

It seems that Robert Redford, the man behind The Kid — and the festival that bears his name — is just as elusive.

A 2013 Esquire profile paints a vivid portrait of the artist as a young man in early 1950s Los Angeles: “Even then, before the flood of real estate money fills the green space and the two-lanes with concrete and freeways … before he ever … takes acting seriously — he’s already … dreaming of the day he finally slides himself behind the wheel of a car and mashes the gas. I’m going to get out of Dodge. I’m going to drive into the mountains, I’m going to drive to the desert, I’m going as far as I can and as fast as I can and as far away from here as I can.”

“Then I hit the road and left,” Redford said.

Eventually, he came to Utah, where he put down $500 for his first couple of acres in the shadow of Mount Timpanogos. According to the Esquire piece, this place, these mountains fueled Redford’s passion for the environment, indigenous people and the land itself.

“There was nothing at the end of the rainbow for me. … Hollywood was not a place I dreamed of getting to. I never could take seriously the obsession people have about being a celebrity or getting to Hollywood — I was born next door,” Redford said.

So what does that Redford make of what this Sundance has become? Of what this little hole in the wall of his beloved Utah has become? Of course, it’s been a brilliant launchpad for emerging independent filmmakers since it started in 1978 as the Utah/US Film Festival with Redford as its inaugural chairman.

The 1989 indie film that launched a thousand festivals, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” premiered at Sundance. So did Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs.” And “The Blair Witch Project. “All shining examples of Redford’s original vision of Sundance as a “mechanism for the discovery of new voices and new talent.” All right here in the place that Redford got the hell out of Dodge for.

Redford retired from acting in 2018 and then took it back, saying, “If I’m going to retire, I should just slip quietly away from acting. But I shouldn’t be talking about it because I think it draws too much attention in the wrong way.”

I have no idea what Redford thinks of all the attention Sundance has ultimately drawn to this otherwise idyllic place. My best guess is the real answer will remain as elusive as the Sundance Kid himself. And in the meantime, I’ll see you on the flip side, Park City. I gotta get out of Dodge.