Park City Ut

PARK CITY, UTAH A post-Civil War mining town with a rough and rowdy past, Park City ( www.parkcityinfo.com) has become increasingly upscale and precious -- not that that's a bad thing. Historic Main Street is framed by 1880s facades, charmingly outlined in white lights at night, with numerous steep public staircases joining the town to its narrow, hillside residential streets.

In the days since the Sundance Film Festival kicked-off here Thursday, Park City has experienced its yearly population boom. And with the arrival of America's top-flight independent film extravaganza comes an inevitable decline in the quality of life. The roads around this former mining enclave are gridlocked with traffic and will remain so through the festival's end on Sunday night.

It's been four years since he was first elected to the top city post here. But every morning, Dana Williams still wakes up and thinks to himself, "I'm the freakin' mayor! Is this the coolest thing in the world?" Apparently it is. Especially when the world descends on this town of 9,000 each January for the Sundance Film Festival, swelling the population to nearly 60,000 over 10 days.

As the country's best-known film festival opens Thursday, one drama that already has generated considerable buzz will play out off-screen: Park City's love-hate relationship with Sundance. Hotels and restaurants love the Sundance Film Festival, expected to draw more than 36,000 visitors to this town of 7,400. Crowds last year, two-thirds from out of state, spent $41.4 million on accommodations, meals and various tourist trappings during the 11-day festival.

Gradually, stealthily, like the pod people taking over the tiny town of Santa Mira in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," documentary filmmakers are taking over the not-so-tiny town of Park City, Utah, and the Sundance Film Festival, whose 2004 edition opens Thursday night with, what else, a documentary. That would be "Riding Giants," a look at surfing directed by Stacy Peralta of "Dogtown and Z-Boys."

At Dolly's Bookstore on Main Street in Park City, Utah, one of the hottest titles is Peter Biskind's "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film" -- a book whose 75,000 copies in print are selling at a "national best-seller level," Simon & Schuster reports. All five copies ordered last summer by manager Sarah Ray have flown off the shelves at Dolly's since their Jan. 5 arrival.

"There are no friends on powder days," goes the old skier axiom. But this particular morning at Park City Ski Area, three friends and I are doing our best to disprove it. Feeling magnanimous, we stop above each new pitch and offer one of our companions first shot at the next stretch of unskied powder. It's easy to be friendly on powder days in Park City, where three mountain resorts record annual snowfalls of up to 350 inches, and there's often another unskied line right around the next tree.

I'm short on stamina and skiing skills, even shorter on time and patience. A weekend in snow country? Not if it means battling freeway traffic and crowded slopes, only to crumple from exhaustion after a few hours of creaky parallel turns.