Rad Smith spent the afternoons of his childhood sitting on the living room floor watching Bob Ross paint happy trees.
Smith now also paints trees, famously on ski maps. This summer, he created the trail map reflecting Deer Valley Resort’s massive terrain expansion. For the 2025-26 season, Deer Valley will add seven new lifts and more than 80 trails. It will also nearly double in size to span about 4,300 tree-studded acres, which means Smith must have sketched thousands of tiny, bristly green conifers.
“Painting trees,” Smith said, “is my nemesis at this point.”
Courtesy of Rad Smith Ski map artist Rad Smith shades in the contours at Deer Valley Resort while painting its 2025-26 ski map. Smith had to find a way to add the resort's 2,000-plus-acres expansion, including seven lifts, more than 80 runs and thousands of trees.
The trees on Deer Valley’s recently unveiled map may not be happy trees, either. Smith guessed they are too small to have big emotions.
Smith, who lives in Montana, also painted the Park City mountain’s 2024-25 map. That entailed combining the most recent trail map — painted by Smith’s mentor, James Niehues — with Smith’s own rendering of last season’s additions at the resort: the first three lifts and about 20 runs in the East Village.
The challenge with creating the 2025-26 ski map, Smith said, was the sheer size of it.
“James’ map, even before the expansion, looked overwhelming to me,” Smith said. “When they called me and shared the master plan with me and how it attached to the existing Deer Valley, I was thinking, ‘Geez, I’m going to have to go 30,000 feet up into space to see the whole area, and then the runs will be so small.”
Courtesy of Rad Smith Ski map artist Rad Smith gets an aerial view of a ski resort in 2022. Weather prevented Smith from flying over Deer Valley Resort's 2,000-plus-acres expansion, so he instead examined hundreds of drone photos and satellite imagery.
Yet, to be useful, the map had to not only be legible but also fit, folded, into a ski jacket pocket.
Resort officials appear to believe he pulled that off. A news release said: “Smith’s artistry preserves the timeless character of ski maps while incorporating modern details that help guests easily navigate the expanded resort footprint.”
Smith had to sacrifice depictions of height for girth to meet those standards. As a result, he acknowledged, Deer Valley may appear flatter on paper than it is in real life. He hopes a secondary map he is working on that features only the expansion area will be able to better highlight the mountain’s claimed 3,040 feet of vertical drop.
“So many nuances [and] so much terrain is kind of lost on a bigger map,” he said.
Smith captured the nuances and the clusters of trees by studying hundreds of drone photos furnished by Deer Valley, plus Google maps and satellite imagery. Over the course of most of the summer, he incorporated the entirety of Green Monster, which at 4.8 miles has become Utah’s longest ski run. He also marked the bend in the two-section East Village Gondola and drew in Park Peak. Designed as the resort’s next learning hub, Park Peak is the upper terminus of the East Village Gondola and will have a lodge and ski school.
Smith even threw in an Easter egg of sorts: A shaded area at the far left of the map promises the Hail Peak area will be open during the 2026-27 season. That means Smith isn’t done painting Deer Valley trail maps, or tiny trees.
“In the back of my mind, it feels like job security a little bit,” he said. “They will need another map.”
Deer Valley expects to open to Deer Valley Season Passholders Nov. 29 and to the public starting Dec. 1.
(Deer Valley Resort) The 2025-26 trail map of Deer Valley Resort drawn by Rad Smith.