WHERE MAPS AND MOUNTAINS COLIDE
Gabriella Le Breton gets delightfully lost in the detail of ski resort maps with The Man Behind the Maps, a collection of maps by the legendary James Niehues
Every skier will have held and studied a ski map at some point. Quite possibly, like me (and Chris Davenport), you will have pinned some to your bedroom walls as a child, to gaze upon and dream of ski lines enjoyed and yet to tackle. But it’s likely that only relatively few of us have ever really contemplated how a piste map is created.
Increasingly, ski resort maps are created digitally yet many of them, particularly for North American resorts, are in fact miniature works of art: intricate paintings of sweeping ski areas complete with every piste, lift, mountainous curve and individual tree painted painstakingly by hand.
This weighty coffee table book delves into the remarkable process by which America’s most prolific trail map artist, James Niehues, has created over 260 ski resort maps for more than 175 different resorts across the globe. As the book’s introduction says: “Niehues, now 73, has become the shepherd of skiers, guiding us through snowy landscapes that he creates with an authenticity that still defies computerized capabilities.”
The book spans some 300 glossy pages, the bulk of which feature beautiful, full-page colour maps for over 200 resorts across the globe, from Aspen and Whistler Blackcomb to Alyeska and Portillo. The maps are arranged in eight geographically themed chapters, which are each introduced by ski industry experts who share their individual ‘perspective’ on Niehues’ work. The paintings do not include marked pistes, which some readers find disappointing. Personally, I enjoy the simplicity of the resulting paintings, which allow you to appreciate the detail of Niehues’ artwork and geography of the mountains.
It’s easy to get lost in the sinews, curves, bowls and details of these resort paintings but myfavourite part of the book is a chapter in which Niehues walks us through the intricate process he follows for creating one of his maps. The example he uses is Breckenridge, a Colorado resort many Ski Club Members will be familiar with, and spans a process that took 22 years from taking aerial photographs of the resort to completing the final image. The story behind the project is engaging but the images that follow, of Niehues’ developing pencil sketches, airbrushing techniques and painting of individual trees and their shadows, are utterly captivating.
In addition to details about the circuitous route which lead to Niehues’ career as a ski resort map artist (in a chapter starting: “It started with an illness.”), the book includes a comprehensive history of art and cartography, with details of two pioneering American ski resort artists, Hal Shelton and Bill Brown. As the book explains: “There would be no James Niehues maps without Shelton, who single-handedly created the genre of hand-illustrated ski-resort maps and forever changed how we use maps, by persuading ski resorts in the 1960s to portray their slopes in an artful way.”
Niehues worked with both Shelton and Brown, and, like them, he blends scientific precision and artistic license, fastidiously gathering data before manipulating perspectives and elements of the landscape to depict it on one piece of paper, that informs viewers about the very nature of a mountain. These subtle distortion techniques include the use of colour perception to make distances relative and extend to emphasising and deemphasising specific trails, while retaining their spatial relationship to the mountain as seen from the air, in order to communicate to skiers that pistes might be longer, narrower or steeper than they might otherwise appear.
“Niehues has become the shepherd of skiers, guiding us through snowy landscapes that he creates with an authenticity that still defies computerized capabilities.”
"I have always enjoyed the challenge of fitting an entire mountain on a single page," writes Niehues. "Mountains are wonderful puzzles, and I knew if I painted with the right amount of detail and care, they would last. A good design is relevant for a few years, maybe even a decade. But a well-made map is used for generations."
I certainly look forward to treasuring this collection of maps for many years to come and to taking inspiration from the legendary ski mountaineer Chris Davenport, who speaks of his lifelong love for Niehues’ maps in his Foreword to the book. “Niehues’ maps are important – even vital – for everyone whose heart and soul revolve around the sport of skiing.”
The Man Behind The Maps: Legendary Ski Artist James Niehues
By James Niehues From £80.49