A bit of a piste artist

Going skiing in North America? Chances are you'll have James Niehues as your guide. Stephen Wood tracks down the world's foremost piste-map maker

The same device kept popping up. Every time I looked at the piste map of a North American skiing resort, it seemed to be there: half-hidden in the forest alongside the old Mountain House lift-base at Keystone, Colorado; tucked beneath a service road at Okemo in Vermont; just outside the ski-area boundary of Blackcomb, British Columbia. Further afield, the uneven lettering – in stark contrast to the neat typesetting elsewhere on the map – lay in the snow at the foot of The Remarkables, the small skiing area above Queenstown on New Zealand's South Island. Fans of Where's Wally? have even, so I'm told, found the same legend, "James Niehues", on Korean, Japanese and Chilean piste maps.

Ostensibly, it is the signature of the artist/cartographer. But the frequency with which it appears – by one estimate, on half of the major North American resorts' piste maps – raised the possibility that Niehues was no more than a brand name, a front for map-production sweatshops in Taiwan. In fact, he is a polite, bearded, 56-year-old man from the small town of Vancouver in Washington State who, over the last 16 years, has become the world's foremost piste-map maker.

Niehues (pronounced knee-hughes) used to work as an art director in advertising. Brought up in Grand Junction, near Colorado's border with Utah, he suffered a long illness in his mid-teens, which prompted his mother to give him an oil-painting set to help pass the time. He painted the mountain scenery – something that, after a midlife crisis and divorce, he decided that he would like to do for a living. Persuaded by his second wife to move to Denver, he met an established piste-map artist named Bill Brown there; and it was Brown who got him his first job.

"The Winter Park resort in Colorado had gone to Bill for artwork showing the back side of Mary Jane mountain," says Niehues. "But Bill said to me 'Why don't you do it? We've got plenty of time, so if it doesn't fly, why, I can take over'." (Whether Brown had the charmingly archaic habit of putting "why" in the middle of a sentence, I don't know; but Niehues certainly does.) "Bill took my work up to Winter Park – and they thought he'd done it. So I guess it was good enough."

What really got him started was another job handed on by Brown, whose work still appears on the piste map of Snowbird in Utah but whom Niehues – to his regret – can no longer trace. "The magazine Snow Country was just starting, and they wanted a piece of artwork on a featured ski resort in every issue. Bill referred them to me; they liked what I did for the pilot issue, and signed me up. For the next three or four years, my work appeared every month across two pages of a magazine distributed to all the people in a position to employ me. It was a tremendous opportunity."

For his resort clients, Niehues usually produces a painting of the mountain and its pistes, a base artwork on which overlays – containing text and graphics – are placed to create the piste-map. (Only recently has he started offering a digital image complete with overlays, thus involving him in an issue he would rather avoid: the rating of the difficulty of pistes, whose inconsistency troubles him a lot.) His first step is to gather information, ideally by photographing the area from an aircraft. He flies over it at about 4,000ft, and shoots straight down; then he'll fly lower to get more detail. From the photographs, he does a sketch for the resort's approval, and then the painting – "in gouache, because it's easy to change".

Although the perspective of the image usually appears to be about 45 degrees off horizontal, it isn't. "Basically, it is an overhead view," Niehues says. "I then roll back the horizon to give the impression that you are looking across the mountains." That sleight of hand merely hints at the complexities of resolving a mountain's three dimensions into two. Where a couple of lifts run up different faces and meet at the top, for example, Niehues has to rotate one of them – and its associated pistes – around the meeting point to show it on a plane. Which immediately poses problems. When angled across the page, a lift and (more important) the pistes will seem less steep: "I have to use visual devices such as twisting the perspective to steepen them up," Niehues explains. To fill in the gaps this creates on the map, some areas of the mountainside have to be "stretched".

But Niehues bristles if you suggest that his maps are not accurate. "The aim is to get the area to look the way it skis. There are few occasions when someone could look at the artwork and say, 'Wow, that's really exaggerated'. Compared with the topographical map, that might be the case. But I'm an interpreter: my job is to enable skiers to move around the mountain and know what they're getting into."

He does the job so well that about 120 ski resorts now use his artwork; and when asked about competitors, he can't think of any, "except computer graphics". (He has tried working on a computer but doesn't think the image quality is good enough – "and anyway, I enjoy the fluidity of brush strokes".) In a good year, he does 20 projects; in a poor one, only a dozen.

Although the resorts may make improvements on the mountains each season, they can add in new lifts or pistes on the overlays without changing the base artwork: typically, innovations such as fun parks and "slow zones" are usually hatched in over the artwork – which may be seven years old or more. But, as Niehues points out, the piste map gets more exposure than any other image of a resort, and much of his repeat business comes from resorts wanting to refresh their "brand".

The map's exposure can take some unusual forms. Niehues sells his artwork outright to the resorts, so the paintings – and his wonky, capital-letter signature – appear not just on piste maps but also on boxer shorts, shower curtains, playing-cards. Serious though he is about his painting, Niehues doesn't object. "What works best is what works for the resort. I'm producing their art, not mine: it is something for them to be proud of."