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Meet the Man Who Paints Your Ski Resort Maps

By Rocky Thompson on December 1st, 2011

If you’ve ever looked at a massive ski resort represented on a tiny fold-up map while helplessly lost, perhaps you took a moment to marvel at the artistry of the map? If so, you can thank James Niehues for your moment of quiet reflection. The man has painted all of the major ski resort maps in watercolor since about 1987. He creates the maps by taking aerial photos and then he folds them together, sometimes bending reality to fit the entire thing on one plane. He’s created about 300 ski resort maps, which he retains the copyright on while leasing to the resort - his most lucrative map sold for $13,500. If you’re interested in the job, he may be on the lookout for a replacement.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2011 at 10:04 am and is filed under Skiing, Snowboarding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Meet the Man Who Paints Your Ski Resort Maps”

  1. the Outage December 3rd, 2011 at 2:22 pm

    If there were two really good artists in this business, we’d both starve

    Love it. Incredible that one guy has a monopoly on this.

    I’m guessing that Niehues’ biggest “competitors” are digital artists. Do you know of any CG ski maps that avoid the “cloned trees” effect he bemoans? Or have you seen any really poor CG facsimiles?