Celebrities flock to Sundance, Utah, of course, to flaunt their Q ratings and take the measure of the great entertainment imperium in the heady mountain air. But the rich and famous are also notoriously inclined to get a little too heady when left to their own devices-and Sundance also has the perfect setup for that dilemma, reports Fortune writer Claudia Wallis: the Cirque Lodge, "the rehab center du jour for those who can afford to go anywhere"-where rates top out at $1,595 a day for a minimum 30-day stay.

Operations director Gary Fisher is of course coyly discreet about the identity of its A-List clientele but tells Wallis that "in eight years, we've had probably 30 or 40 clients that you'd know immediately." Confirmed celeb inmates-immured either for traditional substance-abuse issues or for that obliging, elastic condition of "exhaustion"-include Melanie Griffith, Kirsten Dunst, Eva Mendes, Mary-Kate Olsen and (inevitably) Lindsay Lohan. (Famous dudes apparently are much less inclined to own up to any alcoholic or chemical weaknesses, perhaps because of the forbidding proximity of arch-wholesome guy Robert Redford, and his Rocky Mountain Estate, which sits "just up the mountain.")

Wallis reports that the Lodge-the brainchild of Richard Losee, a devout Mormon jewelry and beauty salon mogul who had envisioned the facility as an ultra-high-end luxury spa until a family member's battle with addiction prompted him to shift course-traffics in fairly standard twelve-step therapy, motivational lectures and reading, and meditation exercises. Mainly, it's the lavish appointments of the place that set it apart.

The Cirque Studio, for example, which houses inmates at the bargain rate of $995 a day, sits in a canyon on the other side of Mount Timpanogos; it was formerly the TV studio for the Donnie and Marie Show in its squeaky-clean 70s heyday. The Studio sprawls across 110,000 square feet, with 17,000-Donnie and Marie's former soundstage-set aside for the central room, which features "what Fisher believes to be the largest ropes-and-challenges course in the country, with plenty of room left over for an archery range and a lecture and movie area."

A pottery studio with ten wheels is close by, as is a bookbinding facility for inmates who want their rehab journals preserved for the ages. There's an indoor equine facility where horse whisperers like Dave Beck, who captains the "experiential therapy" team at Cirque, dispense costly spiritual counsel on the hoof: "You have to be morally correct," he tells Wallis after she has spent after "90 mentally exhausting minutes" with a quarter horse named Rio. With "pithy, Zen-like sagacity," he continues: "If you are angry, frustrated, it all flows through the horse. If you are patient, kind and willing to set boundaries, it flows through to the horse. It's through this building process that you work through your own stuff."

The four-legged therapy channels are housed, of course, in British-imported custom stalls-"the same stalls the Queen of England has," Beck notes in something shy of a Zen-like flourish.

And while horses may be agreeable enough ways of testing an addict's frayed patience, they're not all that efficient as mountain transport. For that, Wallis writes, there's the Cirque helicopter, "a remarkably quiet, European-built seven seater used to take residents on tours of the craggy mountains and canyons." When they're airlifted to Wallsberg Ridge (altitude 8,750 feet), for instance, they're encouraged to leave inscribed keepsake stones; "This rock's name is denial," one such self-narrating offering declares. "I'm leaving it right here."

There's nothing inherently wrong, of course, with addiction sufferers using any means at their disposal to confront their conditions; also, as Wallis reports, about half the Lodge's clients are being treated for other conditions, such as bipolar disorder and depression. Nevertheless, there's something more than a little dispiriting about a treatment facility so lovingly fashioned to reinforce the very message that set many overloaded celebrity egos on the path to addiction in the first place: that they are a breed apart, destined to float through the trials of ordinary life, be they career setbacks, family demands, sickness, or dependencies of spirit or substance, bathed in a quiescent halo of privilege and sycophantic attention, and lavishly staffed by a never-ending stream of valets, concierges and room service personnel. Hence, even as Wallis concedes that "research on alcoholism-by far the most-studied addiction-has not generally found an advantage for residential treatment over less costly outpatient programs," she also uncritically endorses the view of another experiential therapy hand at the Lodge: "Peak experiences"-like horse-whispering and rope-dangling-"wake people up. They start to come out of the haze and numbness and reconnect." Of course it would take a very special experience to galvanize a very special, high-performing ego-and a multimillion-dollar infrastructure to ensure it all comes off without a hitch.

"Do you need a helicopter to stay clean and sober?" Beck asks in yet another pithy show of faux introspection. "The answer is no. But you can also use it to get to a serene place where you can pray and leave a message where others have gone and feel part of that fellowship."

Of course, you can also get a more immediate-and arguably more durable-version of that communion by delivering your testimony as a recovering addict before a clatch of strangers sipping crappy coffee out of Styrofoam cups in a church basement. If recovery is about anything, after all, it's about humility-hence the central role of the Serenity Prayer and the all-important "higher power" step in most AA programs; they are both continual reminders that the substance-impaired self is not really a special thing at all, but just another small link in a latticework of frail, dependent creatures whose understanding falls far short of anything like a legible cosmic design.

But that's the sort of reflection that's none too likely to put you in the path of any horses bivouacked in a royal stall, or a get you a docented tour through the rope-challenge course on the Donnie and Marie soundstage. And it's definitely not the sort of message tailor-made for your ideal Fortune reader.

Even though there's "no research on the benefits of helicopter-hiking or equine therapy," Wallis counsels in classic sing-songy, what-the-hell fashion at the end of her piece, "it makes a kind of intuitive sense that if you get no kick from cocaine or champagne, you've got to find it somewhere else. Standing at the rooftop of the Rockies isn't a bad place to start." Or, if one were to roughly translate that sentiment into quasi-spiritual AA speak: there but for the grace of God goes anyone but you.