“Many skiers come up to me and we get talking and it comes out that I’m the trail map artist, and they all say, ‘Oh my gosh, I thought that was done by computers!’ And I say, ‘No, I paint all of those trees’,” Niehues says. He’s 74 years old with sharp blue eyes. White hairs rise from the dome of his head like snow-covered spruce trees. He has that native Colorado habit of dropping his middle t’s. Mountains become moun’uns.
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Niehues began painting trail maps in 1987, when he was a 40-year-old graphic designer in Denver, struggling to put food on the table for his wife and four children. Colorado has always been his home. He grew up in Loma, a dusty town near the western border with Utah, surrounded by flat-topped mesas and empty red rock canyons. The sort of landscape that stretches the eye and tempts the palette. Niehues’ father would take him on rafting and hunting trips down the Colorado River. As a small child, he would sketch animals on the family farm.