Peak Painter

For skiers, a trail map isn’t just a trail map. It’s a come-hither pin-up, a playground for a daydream powder run.

“They’re souvenirs,” said Keystone spokeswoman Amy Kemp. “Sometimes they’re the primary decoration in dorm rooms and office cubicles — a visual ‘big fish’ story where you can spread out the map and proudly point to the expert-only powder-filled bowl that you skied. And the right map can be worth big money to ski resorts.

“So, you want your map to be accurate, informative and still have that ‘wow — that’s a cool place’ look,” Kemp said.

That’s where James Niehues comes in. For 20 years, Niehues, 61, has been North America’s preeminent ski resort illustrator — the guy who paints the trail maps for almost every mountain from Whistler in Canada to Portillo in Chile.

“But I don’t get recognized too much,” he said with a grin as he worked at his easel last week, dabbing tiny trees on a map of his most recent project, a small ski hill in Maryland called Wisp.

In his tidy suburban basement studio in Loveland, Niehues still does everything by hand. In many ways he’s a modern John Henry, laboring with a brush in an increasingly mechanized world of satellite images and Google maps. Newfangled competitors pop up all the time, ready to steal his business, but they haven’t been able to unseat him because, so far, no one can pull off the “cool” factor like he can.

His maps are clear enough to get skiers around the mountain on even the most blustery days and stunning enough, with their snow-capped evergreens and jagged peaks, to capture the spirit of a place.

“It’s got to be accurate,” he said, “but you’re also in this beautiful setting. The mountainscapes are magnificent. You’ve got to show that.”

FORGING A NEW TRAIL

A love of landscape was Niehues’ introduction to ski maps. He grew up in tiny Loma, west of Grand Junction, hiking and hunting in the sandstone wilderness along the Colorado River.

“I didn’t know how to ski, but I always admired those maps with all those mountains,” he said.

He had a knack for art, but didn’t hone his skills until a kidney disease called nephritis landed him in bed for three months when he was in ninth grade.

“My mom gave me an oil-paint set to pass the time, and I’d paint scenes out of magazines,” he said.

Twenty years passed. Niehues eventually did learn to ski. He got married, started a small advertising company in Grand Junction, had kids, got divorced. He, left the ad company, moved to Denver and did a number of jobs, including creating displays to be used in court cases.

All that time, he had an itch to become an artist, so one day, at age 40, he tucked his portfolio under his arm and knocked on the door of the leading trail map painter.

Trail map painting is such a small world it can really support only one or two full-time artists at a time. The first was Colorado cartographer Hal Sheldon, who started painting ski mountains in the 1960s. (His “Colorado Ski Country” poster is still sold today).) Sheldon trained Bill Brown, who brought the art into the 1980s.

Niehues knocked on Brown’s door in 1987.

“I was lucky. It just so happened that he wanted to get out of the business just as I wanted to get in,” Niehues said.

Brown was getting interested in making documentary videos, but still had ski map commissions coming in, so he passed one — illustrating the new backside of Mary Jane — to Niehues.

“I turned it in with Bill’s name on it,” Niehues said. “It must have been pretty good, because they never noticed.”

From there Niehues took up more and more of Brown’s small jobs. Then he landed his own commission painting monthly mountain views for Snow Country magazine in 1988.

Since then, he’s become alpine skiing’s Annie Liebowitz. He’s painted 144 mountains (including all but a few in Colorado) and an array of aerial views of national parks, golf courses and swanky island retreats. Each has his stylized block signature in the corner. He does 17 to 20 jobs a year, charging from $3,800 to $13,000, depending on the size of the job.

A MASTER AT WORK

A map starts with aerial photos Niehues usually snaps himself from a small plane.

“I can’t express how much I enjoy the experience of soaring above some of the most beautiful and dynamic scenery on Earth,” he said. “I have flown by the Grand Teton so close that I thought I could jump out and survive if I hit the snow just right.”

Sometimes Niehues also skis the resorts to make sure he gets them right, though he describes himself as an intermediate skier who hasn’t gone in years.

“You wouldn’t get me on a lot of those runs,” he said.

From photos, Niehues makes sketches, tweaking until the uncounted crinkles of a mountain lie comfortably on a flat page.

Then he e-mails the sketch to clients for approval.

“They always ask if I can make it look bigger,” he said with a slight chuckle.

Once the sketch gets the thumbs up, a final watercolor, complete with cars in the parking lot, snow on the highest trees, and distant peaks disappearing into atmospheric haze, typically takes a week or two.

The hand-crafted process hasn’t changed much over the years, but the competition has.

Other cartographers now use digital data sets and computer graphics software to woo ski-area business. Some resorts go for it. Vail went digital in 2003. This year Breckenridge (which had a hand-painted map, though not by Niehues) will hand out a trail map made using an image snapped by a satellite orbiting 423 miles above.

“The accuracy is amazing. You’re looking at a real photo, so every tree, every trail, is really as it is,” said Breckenridge marketing director Brett Howard.

Aesthetically, it’s not quite as amazing. The trees appear asare pixilated amoebas. The skyline looks like it was hung out to dry, and the shadows resemble pencil smudges.

“This is terrible,” said Niehues, looking at the new satellite map for the first time. “It’s too crowded in spots, not clear ... It’s just better to do it in your head. The mind is such an amazing thing. Computers get better, but they still can’t do what we can do.”

Some resorts that experimented with computer images have come back to Niehues. He has more orders in 2007 than he had in 2006.

Winter Park recently commissioned a new painting. “He just does such beautiful work with the shading and really showing how the mountain is laid out,” said Mary Woolwine, director of marketing.

Monarch also recently had Niehues repaint the mountain. “We never thought of anyone else,” said Greg Ralph, Monarch marketing director. “I mean, it’s like hearing Michelangelo is available to paint the ceiling. You say, ‘Cool, we’ll take him.’”

Vail, which went to a computer image in 2003, may come back next year.

Who will be next in the line of Colorado-based ski resort illustrators? Niehues isn’t sure. He doesn’t have plans to retire, but he doesn’t have an apprentice either.

Maybe the quiet life of mountain portraits doesn’t have much appeal anymore, he mused.

“Everyone thinks it’s a dying art,” he said. “But I hope it will stick around.”

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0223 or dave.philipps@gazette.com