STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

While the Sun Valley bottomlands have only gotten an inch of snow during the past month, both downhill and Nordic skiing have been nothing short of fabulous. And Sun Valley Resort’s snow guns are blowing bigger blizzards of snow than ever before on the mountain.

But Courtney Gilbert, the artistic director at Sun Valley Museum of Art, knows that other ski areas around the country can’t always count on snow or snow from guns. That’s why words of America’s first indoor ski slope caught her eye.

“In 20 years, we may see more of these as that becomes the only option for people in a world of climate change,” she said.

Gilbert enlisted the efforts of Burton snowboard ambassador and photographer Ryan Bonilla to document Big Snow American Dream indoor ski playground for The Museum’s new Snow Show exhibition, which opened Friday.

His work is paired with works by four other artists, including Sun Valley native Sofia Jaramillo, who puts people of color at the center of the ski culture in her fine art photography.

“When we realized the World Cup Finals were coming to Sun Valley, we knew we had to shift what we had planned to make way for this,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert will lead a free tour of the exhibition at 5:30 tonight--Thursday, Jan. 30--at The Museum in Ketchum.

Many supporters of the museum had a chance to hear from Bonilla and Jaramillo during the exhibition opening on Friday.

Bonilla related how he was turned on to skiing and snowboarding by his father. After boarding around the world, he found himself a regular visitor to Big Snow American Dream, which is 15 minutes from New York City and next to the second largest mall in the United States.

The mall has two runs—one with rails and jumps and the other strictly for skiing. The runs are about as long as a run on Dollar Mountain, Bonilla said.

Additional indoor ski arenas are on target to open in Miami and Dallas, he said.

“It’s kind of nice because it gives people who lives in places without snow a chance to ski,” he said. “We teach inner city kids how to ski and snowboard. It’s pretty affordable—they can get a pass for unlimited skiing and snowboarding for $100 a month. And it keeps them off the streets where they might be doing bad things.”

The indoor ski resort already has become a training ground for athletes to compete alongside skiers and boarders who have grown up training at traditional ski areas. Two of the kids who learned to ski at Big Snow American Dream competed at the X Games in Aspen this past weekend.

“In two hours, you can get 55 runs. That’s 5,500 hits a day,” Bonilla said.

The Sun Valley Museum of Art is the first museum to show Colombian American photographer Sofia Jaramillo’s work, which was featured last month in Outside Magazine. The Museum and Sun Valley Resort helped finance the project titled “A New Winter,” along with Protect our Winters.

Jaramillo said she got the idea walking past the photographs of celebrities in the hallway of the Sun Valley Lodge.

“I realized there was only one person of color there,” she said.  “How does this make people feel today?”

Inspired by vintage Sun Valley photographs, Jaramillo said she decided to recreate the photos using people of color from such places as Indonesia and Puerto Rico. She invited her models to bring a piece of clothing that expresses who they are to the shoot, then took the pictures in the style of vintage Sun Valley photographs.

Others in the exhibition, which runs through April 2:

Catherine Opie, a professor of photography at UCLA who has spent 10 years photographing the winter light that imparts a deep blue to the mountains of Norway.

Bob Reynolds, a Los Angeles artist who created a short film that explores the ever-shifting contours of a massive ice fjord in Greenland.

Mungo Thomson, a Los Angeles artist who uses counterintuitive artmaking strategies coming up with wall calendar lightboxes that begin with commercial calendar images of well-known mountains reproduced at a large scale as if held up to the sun.