February 4, 2026 
My very first date with my now-wife was a Sundance documentary. We were college students and managed to get into the film with student-priced tickets after waitlisting for a few hours armed with a deck of cards, in the cold of Park City, UT. Since then, one or both of us have gone to the Sundance Film Festival nearly every year.
Besides honing my skills as a top-notch celebrity spotter, we quickly learned that the success rate of narrative films in the Dramatic Category was about 50%, while the hit rate in the Documentary Category was probably closer to 99%. So we began snagging tickets only for documentaries. With that strategy over the years, we had the chance to see the premieres of incredible films like Dogtown and Z-Boys, Senna, It Might Get Loud, Searching for Sugar Man, Shut Up and Play the Hits, and so many more best-in-class docs. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.
Last year, it was announced that the festival was moving to Boulder, Colorado, a baffling maneuver, since Mr. Redford started this whole thing in the valley of his own Utah-based mountain resort. This sent shockwaves through our friends in the filmgoing communities of Salt Lake and Park City. We knew we had to go together for one final year in the place that brought us closer all those years ago.
My wife is a bit of an expert at reading a film synopsis and quickly determining whether it’ll be something we’d actually enjoy. We selected six docs to watch over a four-day weekend, with one day designated for a backcountry hike in the Wasatch Mountains. So while she picked the flicks, I started doing one of my favorite things in the world—packing.
Packing is a wildly satisfying chore. I am not one of those minimalist packers by any stretch. There’s nothing I hate more than leaving behind a piece of apparel or gear that I end up needing. For me, it’s all about balancing just enough for the scenarios we’ve planned, while tossing in a few extra pieces of kit for unexpected adventures along the way.
For example, I was planning to bring only my Vasque Gore-Tex hiking boots for both standing in line in the cold and hitting the trail, along with a pair of Teva ReEmber Mocs as warm slippers for recovery in the evenings. But at the last minute, I tossed in a pair of NikeCraft General Purpose sneakers too—and I was so glad I did, because, sure enough, I scored an impromptu invite to a Jazz game at the Delta Center just as we touched down in SLC.
I knew I’d need a multipurpose backpack for this trip—one that could act as my carry-on for the plane as well as my hiking pack on the trail. We’d been working with our friends at Peak Design to supply products as props for a recent holiday photoshoot, so I managed to get my hands on their 45L Outdoor Backpack in the Cloud colorway to put through the ringer.
It’s unlike any pack I’ve ever used before: a fully rigged rolltop, but with back-panel access like their professional photographer setups. They’ve gone overboard with innovation here, creating several stow-and-go pockets as well as lashing points along nearly every edge of the silhouette, making it endlessly reconfigurable. Though its top-loading, cord-secured enclosure is tough to open while it’s sitting in your plane’s overhead compartment, it still performed admirably as a travel companion.
Our theaters were spread across venues in both Park City and Salt Lake City, with just enough time before, between, and after screenings to partake in Utah’s ever-growing culinary scene. Here’s a quick synopsis of our documentary lineup.
The Disciple followed a hip-hop outsider fueled by relentless determination, working his way into the inner circle of the Wu-Tang Clan, where ambition and creativity converge in the making of an album that ignites global controversy.
Everybody to Kenmure Street was an extremely prescient doc that uses crowd-sourced footage to show how hundreds of residents in Glasgow, Scotland blocked an immigration van, preventing the deportation of two Muslim neighbors.
Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story was the incredibly tough, yet hysterical story of a comedian, who turns her mental health journey into material that’s riotously funny and deeply inspiring.
The Last First: Winter K2 was a raw and unfiltered documentary chronicling the intense competition and risk involved in the attempt to secure the “last great prize” in mountaineering: summiting K2 in winter.
Who Killed Alex Odeh? was another extremely relevant doc for our time—a whodunnit about the 1985 unsolved assassination of a director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Give Me the Ball! was a wildly inspiring documentary about the life of the icon of women’s tennis, Billie Jean King, a literal game-changer in every way. She even showed up for a Q&A and hit tennis balls into the crowd.
Thanks to my wife’s superpower of sussing out cool movies, these were all solid A films, with Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story and Give Me the Ball! standing out as the A+’s of the pack. If any of them sound interesting to you, I highly recommend seeking them out.
The trip was capstoned with a backcountry hike at Tibble Fork Reservoir in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. With my bulletproof Marathon Navigator on-wrist and the Peak Design Outdoor Pack on-back, our good friends led us out onto the solidly frozen lake on a stunning day hike. Rather than bringing pre-made snacks on adventures, lately I’ve gotten into the habit of packing gear and fixings to make something along the way. So we brought a stove, mugs, and hot chocolate packets for our mid-journey refueling.
The Peak Design Outdoor Backpack was extremely comfortable. It comes with a stowable waist belt for added support, but the runner’s-vest-style shoulder straps managed the load so well that I never once thought to pull the belt out.
I loved the look of the Cloud colorway against the snowy scenery, and there was more than enough room to haul all the water and cooking gear for our little hot cocoa experience. Despite its lightweight-material appearance, the pack is not an ultralight setup. It is, however, rugged and well-made, with loads of lashing points and useful straps for heavy-duty gloves, an extra midlayer, or a quickly accessible optics solution.
I grew up skating on our local frozen pond as a kid, but never before had I set foot out on a completely solid lake of this size. There were families, hockey games, and figure skaters spread across this deep, dark blue expanse—everyone adding their own scrapes and scratches to the surface of what was once a snow-covered ice field.
The surreal feeling of standing in the middle of a vast winter wonderland was the perfect way to end our last adventure to Sundance before it leaves the Wasatch for the Rockies.
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