VAIL, Colo. — Even Don Quixote didn't try tilting at windmills in the dark, but at least he was favored with wind.
Denver artist Patrick Marold is hoping for the same. He's installed 2,700 mini-windmills along a Vail mountainside that power lights inside tubes they're perched on — a constantly changing tableau for nighttime viewing whose forms will depend on the stirrings of the breeze.
"If there is a statement in my art it is that I try to completely release it. Nature takes control," Marold said, his hands covered with cuts from gouging holes in the mountainside scree for the past week. The project took three months.
"My hands are off now. I just let it happen."
The wind generally dies down in the evening here, so in a sense Marold's mission with "The Windmill Project" could be as daunting as Miguel Cervantes' mythical hero's quest.
There was no wind Sunday night, after the last tube was installed, but weather forecasts called for a front this week that hopefully would illuminate them. It takes at least a 15-mph breeze to drive generators inside the white, eight-foot-tall polycarbonate tubes and really make them really glow.
"A couple of nights ago we had strong winds and they lit up like a birthday cake. It made me tingle," said Leslie Fordham, in charge of public art for Vail. The project, which cost $94,000, doesn't officially open until Friday.
It's another bid to make Vail, the nation's busiest ski area, a cultural destination. Vail already hosts international dancers and singers, including the Bolshoi, and major orchestras.
"Now we want to get into the visual arts," said Fordham.
The town and the ski resort are committed to using as much green power — such as wind — as possible. So "The Windmill Project" makes a statement for the town as well as the artist.
The windmills, whose blades are customized anemometers four inches in diameter, can be seen above a golf course from nearby Interstate 70. At first glance, in the daylight, they could be mistaken for another grove of winter-barren aspens in the snowy background.
The roar of nearby Gore Creek covers any sound the windmills might make, as well as highway noise.
"'I am pleased with how they present themselves during the day. But it is really about the night," said Marold, 32.
The artist, who went to Iceland as a Fulbright scholar, has worked with windmills before. In Iceland he lived on a farm where it was so dark most of the time that he gravitated toward light as an art form. The wind there averaged 30 mph with gusts of 80 mph every day; he built 200 windmills — prototypes for the Vail project.
In Vail, there were other obstacles. The rock was so hard Marold and his crew broke two or three drill bits daily. Some tubes fell apart while being carried to the site on a snowcat.
Marold had to enlist volunteers to join his team of 10 "Sancho Panzas," including schoolchildren one day. "I think they thought they were just coming out to look," he said.
What seems like a lot of heavy lifting comes with naturally for an artist who studied industrial design in Rhode Island. He works with wood, metal from a Boeing 737 and illuminated objects. He has used beetle-killed pine for play structures in a Vail park, and sandblasted handprints of local children on a seven-ton granite boulder pulled from Gore Creek.
The Vail windmills come down after April 22, and Marold hopes to take them to Santa Fe, N.M., where he hopes to move the exhibit from one spot to another every week or month.
"We've even had interest from Chicago, the Windy City," he said.