STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

When the top ski racers from Austria and Germany come to Sun Valley Resort in March for the Alpine World Cup Finals, they will find a comforting touch of familiarity.

They will need to look no further than the Edelweiss Condominiums to see the Luftelmalerei, or mural art, so common to the villages and towns of Bavaria, Germany, and the Tyrolean region of Austria.

Hans Thum, who came to Sun Valley from Kitzbuhel, Austria, to teach skiing, painted the frescoes 52 years ago. And this summer he toiled in the hot sun refreshing them in a journey that lasted into the fall.

“I get a bit nervous seeing him up on his ladder,” said Vicki Seznick, a fulltime resident at Edelweiss. “But Hans said he follows safety precautions, and he says he has special shoes.”

Actually, Thum’s shoes are plain old tennis shoes, but they’re made to hike the trails surrounding Sun Valley and so they have good grip. And the man is possessed with an athletic ability that extended from skiing to painting.

At 86, he retired from teaching skiing midway through the last ski season after 55 years of teaching at Sun Valley Resort. But he apparently has no intention of laying down his paintbrush just yet.

Thum painted a mural in 100-degree temperatures in early summer on a cliff-side home along the Snake River near Buhl. Then, he returned to the Edelweiss in July to touch up his Austrian/Bavarian artwork.  

The Edelweiss had gone through a period of renovation, which included spray painting the exterior. And it left the edges of Thum’s work looking a little shabby.  

“They spruce everything up with new railings, and they said we want to paint the stucco—it doesn’t look crisp anymore. When they painted, they taped around my paintings but I need to touch it up,” he said, dipping his brush into the unique paint mix he uses for exterior murals. “This isn’t just a paint-by-number thing. The work is very tedious, but now it looks clear, sharp.”

Thum was 16 when he apprenticed with a master artist in his hometown after World War II.

“It was not that easy to find work at the time because of the economics at the time. There was an opening for an ironsmith, but I immediately disliked him—he was a grumpy man. So, I did painting, instead,” he recounted.

Thum tagged along with his mentor as he went to small villages painting and restoring elaborate scenes of mountains and people on the walls of pensions, inns and churches.  And, later, he attended a painting trade school in Innsbruck, following it up with training in art and restoration in Vienna.

After serving in a mountain regiment in Austria, he followed Kitzbuhel native Sigi Engl to Sun Valley where Engl was head of the Sun Valley Ski School. During winter he taught skiing to such students as Ethel Kennedy and actor Tim Allen, setting them at ease with his graceful arcs on the snow.

And during summer he and Bavarian ski instructor Florian Haemmerle painted traditional Austrian/Bavarian pictures on private homes in the Wood River Valley and in places like Jackson, Wyo., and Beaver Creek, Colo. His first commission, given to him by Glenn Janss, wife of then-Sun Valley Resort owner Bill Janss, was a knight on the exterior of the Sun Valley Inn.

Thum was asked to paint the Edelweiss in the early 1970s by its owner who spent a lot of time skiing in Austria.

“He, said, ‘Hans, we have to do something. The Edelweiss looks too static,’ ” Thum recounted. “He had always been fascinated with this type of art and said, ‘Let’s design something.”

Thum’s paintings on the Edelweiss Condominiums commemorate the Tyrolean resistance against Napoleon in the Austrian mountains in 1809. There are crests, knights and, of course, paintings of the starry white edelweiss flower, a symbol of true love and courage given folktales of young men climbing dangerous mountains to pick the flower as a sign of love to their beloved.

From his perch atop the ladder at Edelweiss, Thum was able to look across to the Warm Springs side of Bald Mountain where he and another ski school employee cut the trees on the steep, steep Upper Greyhawk ski run.

As he worked, crews were busy cutting trees along Upper Greyhawk again—this time to prime the course for the World Cup Alpine Ski Finals.

“Not much goes on in Warm Springs during the summer, but it is very busy here during winter,” said Thum. “You see these images all the time from the mountain. This winter people from all over the world will see these paintings.”