Simon Beck Snow Art: How He Walks Giant Snowshoe Drawings in the Alps

British artist Simon Beck makes some of the largest drawings in the world, and he makes them with nothing but snowshoes, a compass and his own legs. Walking for hours across frozen lakes and snowfields in the French Alps, he stamps out geometric patterns 200 feet or more across that only make sense when seen from above.

Great Big Story’s short film Art at Altitude: Snow Murals in the Mountains, published in February 2016, follows him at work.

Who is Simon Beck?

Beck was born in London in 1958 and studied engineering at the University of Oxford. He spent his career as a cartographer, designing maps for the sport of orienteering, and he was a keen orienteer himself. That training in bearings, pacing and precise measurement became the foundation of his art. He describes snow drawing as map-making in reverse: instead of recording the ground on paper, he transfers a design from paper onto the ground.

He lives at the Les Arcs ski resort, near Mont Blanc in France, and makes most of his drawings close to home on snow-covered frozen lakes. By 2023 he had completed nearly 400 snow drawings, and the work had long since become his main source of income.

How it began: a frozen lake at Les Arcs in 2004

The first drawing was a whim. After a day’s skiing in 2004, Beck looked at a small frozen lake outside his building, about half the size of a football pitch, and decided to walk a pattern across it. “It was just a bit of fun,” he later told Nice News. The hobby grew into a career.

Since then he has worked across the United States, Canada, Japan, Chile and Argentina, including Banff National Park in Alberta and Powder Mountain in Utah. Brands such as Corona have commissioned him. In summer he switches to sand, and he has made around 180 drawings on a single beach in south-west England.

How a snowshoe drawing is made

Each piece starts with mathematics. Beck’s designs are geometric, often built on fractals, and he plans them on paper first. On site, he spends about an hour and a half setting out the main lines using compass bearings and carefully counted paces. One simple design, for example, uses ten radii of 45 double paces each.

Once the framework is laid down, he fills in the shapes, often listening to classical music or Pink Floyd, which he calls his “personal stereo time”. The physical effort is enormous: a drawing takes anywhere from 7 to 30 hours, and setting one out is comparable to hiking about 20 miles over rough ground. Deep, soft snow can wear him out within a few hours. He fuels the work with soup and Coca-Cola.

Light, shadow and the race against fresh snow

Because a drawing lasts only until the next snowfall, wind or skier, photography is part of the art. Beck watches the weather forecast so that a piece is finished in time to be photographed the following day. The best pictures come in the morning or late afternoon, when a low sun throws shadows into the compressed tracks and gives the pattern depth and contrast. He chooses sites with good vantage points nearby where few people will walk across the design.

Seeing the work in person is a lesson in scale. A walker standing inside the design sees only trampled snow, while someone on the slope above sees a snowflake, a star or an intricate fractal.

Try a small snow drawing yourself

• Sketch a simple design on paper first: a star, a spiral or concentric circles.
• Plan your route, including where you enter and leave, so you never cross an area meant to stay untouched.
• Use a level, flat field of fresh snow on solid ground, and pace your distances.
• Photograph it from a window, balcony or slope in low-angle morning or evening light.

Stay off frozen lakes unless the ice has been checked and declared safe locally.

More snow art on the site: Simon Beck’s snow dragon in Siberia, these 30 snowman ideas, Katrina Lazzarotto’s mountain-lake skating film and Finn’s backyard snow maze.

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