New Ski Film Scored by The Grateful Dead Stars Mickey Hart

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.

Shown the Light

Standing atop a massive ice sculpture of a mammoth’s head illuminated with Grateful Dead logos and laser projections, Mickey Hart looked past his familiar drum set at something he, and presumably nobody, had seen before.

Adjacent to the brilliant ice sculpture was a massive hip feature. Cliffs towered above, lit up with neon pink, blue, and white projections. Skiers waited nearby wearing suits emblazoned with 81 feet of LED lights. Hart was wearing one of the suits himself.

Behind Hart, but strategically out of frame, “Mountains of the Moon” Chief Lighting Technician, Shane Treat, was standing by with a kill switch.

“It was just too high risk,” he said about delegating the safety of the Grateful Dead’s iconic 80-year-old drummer while he’s strapped into an electrified light suit. Burning one of the greatest drummers of all-time—or worse—due to a malfunction, was a risk Treat was not willing to take. Treat is uniquely prepared for this task. After all, he invented the suit.

Despite Treat’s rather mundane title, Chris Benchetler’s upcoming film simply couldn’t exist without him. Benchetler calls Treat the “creative genius” behind the suits. He is not the most qualified; he’s the only person qualified to inspect and repair them.

The Grateful Dead’s music is a significant “driving force” for Benchetler’s creativity. In the past few years, that relationship has become symbiotic, with Dead and Company—and Hart particularly—integrating Benchetler’s work into their live shows. As for Treat, whose contact was saved as “Backcountry Jesus” in Benchetler’s phone for years, it has been on a Long Strange Trip, indeed.

Chris Benchetler first skied in light-suit technology for Sweetgrass’ 2014 film “Afterglow.” Skiing alongside Pep Fujas, Eric Hjorleifson, and Daron Rahlves, the lightsuit segment laid the foundation for Benchetler’s seminal “Fire on the Mountain” film, released in 2019 by TGR.

Audiences were led through a trippy journey of skiing, mountain biking, and surfing. The Grateful Dead’s iconic tracks weaved the path, and Basketball Hall-of-Famer and Dead Head Bill Walton narrated with wonder and passion. “Fire on the Mountain” was not only a hit. It was a brutal, expensive, and painstaking work of art.

Six years later, Benchetler is preparing to debut “Mountain of the Moon.” It’s not a sequel, per se, but the film’s behind-the-scenes YouTube series, “Ship of Fools,” teases similar elements that made “Fire” film a smash hit—skiing and other action sports, The Grateful Dead, and lightsuits.

Only this time around, the suits actually worked.

“Every single trick Pep (Fujas) threw, and every cliff Hoji stomped, something would burn out,” Treat revealed about “Fire on the Mountain’s” lightsuits. “It probably cost $100,000 in post just to turn those LEDs back on.”

The suits used in “Fire” weren’t cheap—Treat estimates each suit cost $20,000 to build—and yet the lights constantly shorted, the power would fail, or the rough environments inherent with shooting a ski, bike, surf, and adventure movie would take their toll.

Benchetler tasked Treat not only with inventing new lightsuit technology that would be safe and fail less often, but he also had a new vision in mind. Rather than a static LED light that can flood images and distort perspective, Benchetler wanted the skeletons to have a holographic effect that sat off the athlete, and presented as if they were “floating in time and space.”

To achieve this, Treat worked with Benchetler’s sponsor, and no-questions-asked supporter of “Mountains of the Moon,” Arc’Teryx. Through months of research and development, the team created 14 suits with 22 proprietary LED-illuminated bones on each.

Treat is a man who’s hard to explain in just a few words. He’s brilliant, but his intelligence doesn’t come off as insulting. He’s a regular guy who still loves skiing; in fact, he once rescued Chris Benchetler’s crashed snowmobile in the Whistler backcountry by happenstance, hence the “Backcountry Jesus” nickname.

To make the suits work for Benchetler’s vision, Treat invented new two-layered LED strip technology that is lubricated to prevent tears, waterproofed, and can withstand nearly anything Mother Nature throws at it.

“I build systems for a living,” says Treat, which is a humble way to describe his profession. In reality, Treat and his company, Mountainside Hydronics, install boilers at various businesses and establishments around the country. One week, the job might take him to a fancy clubhouse at a private golf course. Or, as was the case this summer, a nuclear submarine base that needed 38 new boilers in record time.

His explanation for why he agreed to work on “Mountains of the Moon,” and subsequently press pause on his personal business for two years, was simple—Chris Benchetler. “He’s just a beautiful human,” Treat says. “If he wasn’t that type of person, and we didn’t have that type of friendship, I wouldn’t have done [the project].”

Benchetler, after working with Treat on various projects throughout the years, asked him to join “Mountains of the Moon” before it was even funded. “Chris asked me to come up to Arc’Teryx in Vancouver to talk about the idea. We went out to dinner with people in charge of making decisions, and I already knew. I just didn’t say it. I felt something change, and I was like, ‘We got this thing.’

Art isn’t easy to make; it typically comes with struggle, especially for a project with such high expectations as “Mountains of the Moon.” However, Benchetler’s ability to draw in the world’s most talented people and convince them to sacrifice is impressive.

Treat worked 12-hour shifts seven days a week to make up for the time he took off for Benchetler’s film. He suffered “multiple” breakdowns, worked through countless nights, endlessly stressed over safety, and almost quit throughout the process, but Benchetler’s belief, demeanor, and love kept him going.

“I have self-worth issues,” Treat admitted. “But I realized that I feel better creating things that help people even more than skiing. The trust that [Chris] had in me to invent something helped me.”

Despite the incredible “Ship of Fools” video series and the various stills we’ve been allowed to see thus far, Bechetler is keeping many of the visuals, and even the film’s theme, under tight lips. When pressed for more details, he asked that I patiently wait for the public premiere in Los Angeles on October 18, 2025. But he did offer insight into his creative vision.

“Almost every [adventure sports] movie you see is to fulfill brand obligations,” Benchetler says. “When I pitched this to Arc’teryx and my other sponsors, I told them I wanted the opportunity to express myself completely free of any tie to a return on investment or a traditional way of doing things.” 

Benchetler first made a name for himself as a skier, but he’s an artist at heart. Skiing, and ski filmmaking are unique forms of artistic expression, but “Mountains of the Moon” is his boldest project yet.

Similar to Treat, Benchetler has sacrificed deeply, including investing his own money into the project. When asked about the potential payoff, Benchetler stuck to his beliefs. Art isn’t about financial gain, he explained. Art is about struggle, collaboration, and creation.

“In the sense of when you truly believe in something, and you truly do it for the right reasons and for yourself, I think, yes, you’re right. [Art] does pay off over time,” Benchetler conceded. “I try not to ever take the easy road.”
Or as Jerry Garcia once put it, “When life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at your door.”

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.

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