Do you like my hat? I do. What a hat! I like that party hat!

Talking over lunch with The Sheet at Mountain Rambler Brewery in Bishop, Ann Piersall recalled comments made by several visitors to Sage to Summit during last weekend’s Chocolate Art Walk. Upon taking in Piersall’s landscape paintings and popular trucker hats, “there were some people who told me I looked too young to be an artist,” Piersall laughed. “They thought I worked at Sage to Summit.”

Piersall, 28, has packed plenty of accomplishments into her relatively short life. The latest is the aforementioned, highly popular hats, which bear images of her unique mountain landscapes.

Piersall grew up skiing, backpacking, and climbing in Glacier National Park near her hometown of Kalispell, Montana. “At one point I thought I would never leave Montana,” she said. But after attending the University of Montana in Missoula, she became a Fulbright scholar and traveled to Kyrgyzstan to complete a project on glaciology and water resources.

Being in Kyrgyzstan “opened me up to the fact that there were other places in the world besides where I grew up,” Piersall said. When she returned, she began working seasonally throughout the west as a mountain guide, climbing ranger, and ski patroller. Eventually she found her way to Mammoth Mountain’s Ski Patrol, and remained in the area that summer, working on Yosemite Search and Rescue.

By the end of that year, Piersall said, she had decided to stay. After two years in Mammoth she moved to Bishop two years ago, and has since landed a dream job as an Air Monitoring Technician for Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District.

“I work as the auditor, helping maintain a high level of quality in the meteorological and air monitoring data we collect from all the field stations,” Piersall explained. “.. . a.k.a. I’m a nerd!”

So how does art fit into all of this?

Piersall said she’s painted since she was a kid, but because of her seasonal work, had taken to sketching instead. “About a year and a half ago, a friend gave me a canvas and I did a larger-scale painting … It was the painting of Mount Morrison.”

Piersall’s paintings are striking in their use of bold, abstract lines to evoke familiar mountain landscapes in a new way. That first painting inspired others, and Piersall showed her work to the public for the first time at Sage to Summit during last year’s Chocolate Art walk.

“The response was amazing,” she said. “I think every artist loves their own work, but knowing what the public will think of it is sometimes hard.” Since then she’s also shown her paintings at Mountain Rambler Brewery, and again at Sage to Summit during this year’s Chocolate Art Walk.

More recently, she came up with the idea of creating hats that bore images of her paintings. “My motivation was making the art accessible, and also available to people who wouldn’t traditionally purchase art,” she said. “I started producing hats, and I could not keep them in stock.”

Piersall now sells her hats at Sage to Summit (also online through the store’s website), Mobil Mart, Stellar Brew, Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association Visitor Centers, and her own website (annpiersall.com).

“They’re phenomenal,” said Sage to Summit owner Karen Schwartz of Piersall’s hats. “They’re probably one of the top sellers at Sage to Summit.”

Schwartz said the three most popular hats are the Minarets, Bishop skyline, and Mount Whitney.

Piersall she said she had no idea the hats would be so popular. She’s thought about expanding the business, but feels the tension between creating unique hats, and inundating Eastern Sierra communities now that the hats have become so successful.

Recently Piersall said a local recommended that “I should make a hat, and then you have to show your license [to get it]. A locals only hat,” she laughed. While she might not go that far, she said she still plans to keep changing hat colors and images to add variety.

The hats have become so popular, in fact, that Piersall said she’s gotten distribution interest from communities in Tahoe, San Francisco, and the Northwest. She said she’s considering another series of hats that would depict the landscapes she knows and loves in the Rockies.

In spite of her success, Piersall said that for now, she doesn’t plan on turning art into her full-time job. “I’m by profession a scientist, by passion a skier, cycler, climber, and art is something I care deeply about and means a lot to me, but is just one more thing I have going on,” she said.

Piersall said that work, play, and painting all feed each other. “I often drive to Owens Lake for work at six or seven in the morning, when the sun is rising. If I was a painter [full time], I’d probably be drinking coffee in the kitchen,” she laughed. “My work has exposed me to beautiful places.”