Cartographer Jim Niehues admits he wasn’t a great skier when he was commissioned by the owners of the Steamboat Ski Area in 1988 to create a trail map for the resort.

“I came up (to Steamboat Springs) and sat in some meetings with the mountain manager and the marketing people. We discussed what they wanted, and just drew out a few quick sketches,” Niehues said. “Then I went up and skied the mountain. I wasn’t a very good skier at the time, but I at least got to the top of mountain and skied down several different runs just to get a feel of the mountain.”

That was 37 years ago, and today many might consider Niehues an iconic figure in skiing. He was named to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2019 and is part of the Hall of Fame Class of 2021 in the Colorado Snowsports Museum.

But he will be the first to tell you he earned those honors working with a pencil and paint brush and not racing down a double black diamond ski run.

He is the artist behind more than 300 ski resort trail maps worldwide — including paintings of Aspen, Breckenridge, Crested Butte and Copper Mountain; along with Winter Park, Vail and, of course, Steamboat Springs.

In 2019, he released a coffee-table book, The Man Behind The Maps which includes more than 200 of his paintings, and sells reproductions of his classic works of art.

“It was an important, a very important one for me at the time,” Niehues remembers of the 1988 trails map. “It was a big Colorado ski area, and I remember getting (the job) back in the days when I just started — it was a big deal for me.”

Niehues was living in Denver when the opportunity to paint the Steamboat Ski Area happened. He still recalls his first trip to the mountains in northern Colorado and the challenges he faced just getting to Mount Werner.

“I had an old Volkswagen (Dasher), and I took off from Denver,” Niehues said. “I remember going out that my tires weren’t good, and I was hydroplaning, and then (as I headed up) the pass my carburetor froze up because it had water in it.”

He was able to pull over to the side of the road several times between Kremmling and Rabbit Ears Pass, pull his air filter off and clean out the ice.

“It was a big storm, and it was really a hassle to get up there,” Niehues said. “So, I had to pull off on the side of the road to fix it… that was quite an experience to go up and visit the ski area.”

At a meeting with officials, Niehues went on to rent a plane and took more than 150 aerial photographs offering different perspectives from different elevations. He made a record of the many features on the mountain.

When he returned to his drawing board, the images helped him create a beautiful pencil rendering of the landscape, the trails and the base area at the Steamboat Ski Area.

That sketch was used as the framework as Niehues and the resort adjusted and changes before the painting was created. That was used for maps for the following season.

When reached Friday, Loryn Duke, the Steamboat Resort’s Director of Communications, said she was unaware of the location of Niehues’ original painting that was used to make the maps. She said there is a good chance that the physical painting is somewhere in storage, and is likely also stored digitally.

She added that the process of making trail maps has evolved over the years, but many resorts still utilize the artistic process that Niehues brought to his creations.  

“It’s still happening,” Duke said. “I know that James had an apprentice (Rad Smith) who was basically taking over for him. I’m pretty sure he’s the one who made Deer Valley’s new trail map now that they’re expanding their resort, so that is still an art form that exists — but a lot of resorts, I think, have gone to digital creation.”

Duke added that Steamboat Resort has updated the resort’s trail map several times during Full Steam ahead, and that changes happen almost every year. The latest map was the creation of designer Stephan Bass.

“Obviously, during Full Steam Ahead the last four years we have changed our trail map drastically every year,” Duke said. “That is a new design, but every year we update it because there’s different things we have to do on the trail map, besides just the trails … where bathrooms are, where first aid is located and information and things like that. It’s not merely an exercise in cartography, there’s research, there’s sketches, there’s digital drafts, and then there’s final art.”

Part-time Steamboat Springs resident David Clarke reached out to Niehues a few years ago, and purchased the original 1988 pencil sketch that was used to create the painting. He was also able to acquire a painting that was created for Snow County Magazine along with a provenance letter that documents the history of ownership and the history of a work of art or cultural artifact from its creation to its present owner.

Today those pieces can be found in Clarke’s Front Range home and represent two of the three parts of the 1988 project Niehues completed for the resort.

Clarke said he is not a collector and purchased the art because of his love of Steamboat Springs, where he has owned property since 2004 and still owns property today.

“It’s an important piece of Steamboat history and the mountain,” Clarke said of a Niehues’ art that he displays on the walls of his Denver home. “I was lucky to get it.”