STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

A massive elk with an impressive rack gazes out through pine trees, mountains rising behind it in shades of grey, white and red.

The mural is not made of paint. It's not a photograph. It's steel — hundreds of individually laser-cut pieces of quarter-inch steel, bolted together and colored with nothing but acid patinas etched into the metal itself.

The mural is installed on the back wall of the Leadville Trading Building at 2nd and Leadville in Ketchum — the side facing Vintage Restaurant and The Kneadery. It is the work of Red Star Ironworks, a design studio and metal shop based in Bellevue.

Peter Michael Lambert shows off the Red Star Ironworks studio’s impressive machinery.

And it has become one of the most talked-about additions to Ketchum's art scene.

"The young men that created this are super excited, and I think it adds a lot to the Ketchum art scene," said Janet Jarvis, a longtime architect in the Wood River Valley.

The mural was commissioned by Mark Dooley, owner of the Fiamma restaurant building on which the mural hangs. The wall backs up against an adjacent lot where windows weren't practical, leaving what the Red Star team calls "a dead space he wanted to bring alive."

Mission accomplished. Diners at Vintage now look up from Rodrigo's little garden space to a sweeping vignette of the Wood River Valley rendered in steel — low mountain ranges surrounding a river that flows into the foreground, with a mule deer as the commanding centerpiece.

A close up of the elk mural.

And those waiting for a table while on the front porch of The Kneadery have something spectacular to admire while they wait.

The men behind it are Zac Ennis, Peter Michael Lambert and designer-draftsman Sam Dispenza — three craftsmen whose journey to the Wood River Valley winds through Pittsburgh, West Virginia and even central Mexico.

"We started in Pittsburgh," Ennis said, settling into a chair at the Bellevue shop across the street from Bloom Community Food Campus. He met Lambert about 20 years ago when he started as an apprentice at a blacksmith shop. "Both Peter and I got into metal work because of blacksmithing. Red Star started as a blacksmith shop."

Ennis had just finished a writing degree when he decided he actually wanted to work with his hands. He took the apprenticeship, and the rest, as he puts it, is history. The two eventually ran sister shops — Lambert's in West Virginia and Ennis's in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he lived for eight years doing heavily forged architectural work.

The Red Star Ironworks staff shows the original elk prototype.

When COVID shut the border down, Ennis moved everything back to West Virginia and the two began looking west.

"We wanted someplace that had good access to public land and close access to clientele," Ennis said. "And we were looking for a good place to raise our children. When we got here, we just immediately fell in love with it. How could you not?"

They've been in the valley a little over five years now. And they describe their operation as "more of a design studio that just happens to work in metal." Most of their work is residential — fireplace screens, gates, sculptural pieces — locked behind the closed doors of the valley's new residences and remodels.

The Ketchum mural is by far their largest public endeavor.

Peter Michael Lambert shows some of the gate work that the crew has built.

The process began with a concept sketch from Lambert. The team explored several approaches, including a more three-dimensional design, before settling on a bas-relief style better suited to the location. Then Dispenza took over what Lambert calls "the heavy lifting."

He built a complete 3D digital model, then mapped out each individual piece to be laser-cut from sheet steel.

"I had like three weeks straight of work, just drafting and turning it from a concept image into the nuts and bolts," Dispenza said.

The elk alone contains more than a hundred individual pieces. The team even built a scale prototype of the elk's head in the shop to work out the dimensional relief before committing to the full piece.

The entire mural comprises many hundreds, all drawn on a computer, cut with a laser, then assembled like an enormous jigsaw puzzle.

The whole thing weighs multiple tons — 12 sheets of quarter-inch steel sourced from suppliers in Boise and Twin Falls. And, because the assembled mural was far too large to transport, every piece had to be brought up to Ketchum and installed on site.

"We ended up going with a model where all the different pieces are bolted on and there's nuts on the back of the wall," Ennis explains.

Installation took three days with a full crew of five on the scaffolding and additional workers back at the shop.

Then came the color. There is no paint on the mural — none. All the rich blacks, warm reds and weathered tones come from steel patinas, acids applied to the metal that etch the surface and create what Ennis describes as something like "a black rust." A week of patina work gave the piece its depth and warmth. It was sealed with a clear coat for protection.

The feedback has been immediate and enthusiastic. Ennis says he gets text messages regularly from people who've seen it. But, of all the compliments, one mattered most.

"Janet Jarvis was one of the first people to hire us when we moved here," Ennis said. "We feel like she's our fairy godmother. She introduced the whole project and had the confidence in us to take it on. Her being happy was probably the most important thing. If it's good enough for Janet, we know it's good."

"What a collective effort," said Lamberg. "Sam had this brilliant way of putting the thing together. Zach is like a symphony director, but of chaos — bringing pieces together, getting men in the right place, metal flying around. Every single person was a part of the creation process."

The team is still debating what to call the mural. The original sketch was called "Breakline," though even Ennis admits he's not sure where that came from.

"We'll get back to you on what we want to call it," he says with a laugh.

Whatever they call it, anyone walking down Ketchum’s Leadville Avenue will know exactly what it represents — the Wood River Valley itself, rendered in fire-forged steel by craftsmen who came here looking for mountains, public land and a good place to raise their kids--and found all three.