A Strange Trip into the Creative Mind of Skier & Artist Chris Benchetler

Benchetler is no stranger to ambitious film projects. His last film, 2019’s Fire on the Mountain, took years to produce and much of his own money to finance. That film, also set to a Grateful Dead soundtrack, showcased similar visuals of skiing and surfing in the daytime and also at night in glowing skeleton suits. It was narrated by NBA Hall of Famer (and legendary Deadhead) Bill Walton.

But Mountains of the Moon is easily his most ambitious to date. Production involved a year of filming around the clock, a massive budget that nobody will put a number on, and film crews numbering in the dozens that worked entirely at night in inhospitable, hard-to-reach places. That included a granite slab in Bishop, California, a mud-drenched forest on the Oregon coast, and a jellyfish-infested ocean off the coast of Tofino in British Columbia. On far more benign terrain in Santa Monica, those efforts transformed into a curious amalgamation of a Meow Wolf art installation, a Dead show, and a ski and surf flick.

The night before the L.A. premiere, Benchetler was at dinner with a group from the film’s title sponsor, Arc’teryx. He sipped tequila on the rocks and chatted with a bearded, bespectacled mycologist named Paul Stamets, who’s known for his research on fungi production and the use of mushroom mycelium for medicinal purposes. Stamets narrates the film, which intersperses Planet Earth-like footage of mushrooms, whales, bald eagles, moon jellyfish, and a black bear snatching a fish from a river among the high-octane shots of skiing, surfing, free diving, rock climbing, and mountain biking. The narration presses on the message that humans and human culture, like fungi, are interconnected: nature, music, art, life, death, you, me—it’s all part of one ecosystem.

Neither the script nor Stamets’ participation in the film are for the sole sake of service to a metaphor though. A decade ago, Benchetler struggled with a head injury and concussions from too many crashes as a hard-charging pro skier and when western medicine failed him, he found mushrooms instead. “I started doing research and I found a lot of Paul’s research. I’m a curious human and I love learning,” Benchetler says. “That led me down a path and I learned a lot about healing my brain.”

Stamets is just one example of the characters who exist in Benchetler’s strange and beautiful orbit, which consists of an eccentric circus of people with highly specialized skillsets who’ve all said yes to Benchetler’s wild vision for reasons none of them can quite understand. Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead’s 82-year-old drummer, is another. In one scene, he wears a skeleton suit and plays the drums on California’s snow-covered Mammoth Mountain while skiers and snowboarders soar overhead off a jump carved into a 100-foot-long wooly mammoth ice sculpture.

Then there’s Shane Treat, the film’s so-called chief lighting technician, an engineer who spent thousands of hours imagining and building the light suits that the athletes wore in the film. Treat put aside his usual work building hydronic heating systems for a whole year to focus on the project. Benchetler, a longtime friend, tasked him with building holographic light suits that would float away from the body and glow iridescent, reflecting light in multicolor. They had to flex for movement, handle inclement weather, and work underwater without electrocuting anyone. In other words, Benchetler had asked him to build the impossible.

“I’ve overcommitted, but I don’t know how to quit,” Treat said during the making of the film. To bring his friend’s imagination into reality, Treat worked with a team of designers from Arc’teryx to sew and build the suits, a process so complex that R&D took six months longer than expected. The first light suit allegedly cost tens of thousands of dollars to make, and they made over a dozen of them for the film.

The skeletons are an iconic symbol of the Grateful Dead, but they’re also an “essential framework for life on this planet," according to Benchetler. “For me, the skeleton suits represent stripping down the core of what makes us human,” he says.

Photo courtesy Arc'teryx

That dozens of people agreed to take part in a project that involved little sleep, ridiculous hours, and challenging locales is a testament to Benchetler’s magnetic creativity. Pro snowboarder Danny Davis, who appears in the film, called the project a “beautiful shitshow,” while pro skier Michelle Parker, also in the film, called it both a “logistical nightmare” and “the ultimate collaboration.” Pro climber Alannah Yip mused, “The more he explained his vision for the film to me, the less I understood.” Jeff Wright, a cinematographer who worked on the film, said he agreed to the project because he knew he would have extreme FOMO if he wasn’t there. “You just can’t say no to Chris,” he said.

The idea for Mountains of the Moon came to Benchetler like a bullet train, a surge of creative expression that he couldn’t contain. In 2014, he appeared in a night skiing segment in a movie by Sweetgrass Productions called Afterglow. Nothing like it had been done before. It was shot at night in the backcountry of Canada and Alaska, where skiers, including Benchetler, wore custom suits equipped with LED lights. The trippy nighttime visuals were unique, but Benchetler took that idea and scaled it way up for a segment in Fire on the Mountain. Still, he felt like there was more to be done.

“I don’t create art for people to like,” he says. “I create art because it’s living within me and it’s something I need to express.” On the wall of his painting studio back home in Mammoth Lakes, California, he’s written a message in scribbled paint: “Don’t think about creating art, just do it.” He says he never approaches the canvas with a plan. Whatever comes out is what was living within him. “I create from a place of instinct, where I try to be a vessel for something larger,” he says. “Something ineffable.”

Benchetler’s wife, Kimmy Fasani, a pro snowboarder, is at the premiere in L.A., too, of course. She’s had Benchetler’s back since the start of this grandiose experiment. She also recently came out with her own film, a striking 2025 documentary called Butterfly in the Blizzard, about her battle with breast cancer and juggling motherhood—the couple have two young sons—alongside her snowboarding career. In 2022, Benchetler and Fasani started a nonprofit organization, the Benchetler Fasani Foundation, to help people who’ve suffered loss find healing in nature. But at the premiere, she’s in a supporting role. “I’m a believer that the universe is give and take,” she says. “Being able to honor passion and purpose and drive, that’s what makes Chris who he is and what this project is about.”

From left, snowboarder Elena Hight, director Chris Bencheter, snowboarder Kimmy Fasani, and photographer Christian Pondella | Photo by Megan Michelson

But if you ask Benchetler what this project is about, what it actually means, he’ll tell you that’s up to you to figure out for yourself. He’s just creating because he has to let his visions go free. “The thought of perfectionism within my art is gone,” he says. “I’m throwing paint at the canvas, trying to disconnect from what my expectation is and go off my emotion and feeling. My art has been a process, and it will continue to be a journey.”

When the film finished at the end of the night, Benchetler finally got to celebrate his birthday with his friends, this group of wild and willing souls who put their own lives on hold to help turn their friend’s dream into something you can hold onto. They walked out of the theater and into the night, the place where this whole idea was born. Mountains of the Moon is a weird and magical and possibly enlightening film, but perhaps what makes the project so powerful isn't the music or the visuals but the fact that all of these people came together—in the dark, for months on end, in far-flung places—to make it happen.

Mountains of the Moon is currently playing in L.A. through 23 November 2025, after which it will launch on a global tour.