Magic Flashlights: Knife Show Snowboard Film at Mount Hood’s Timberline

Magic Flashlights is a short snowboard film from Knife Show, shot and edited by Mike Benson on Mount Hood, Oregon, at Timberline Lodge and High Cascade Summer Camp. Six riders hit rails and park features while glowing visual effects trail from their boards, as if a flashlight beam had come to life and joined the session.

Mike Benson’s Mount Hood snowboard film

Benson’s idea is simple and fun. The riding is real, filmed on the snow and park features of a working summer camp, and the effects are layered on top: bright blue streaks and glows that follow a rider over a rail or hang in the air above a trick. Watch how the light guides your eye. It picks out the path of a board, underlines a spin and separates the rider from the snow around it.

The effects only work because the riding is solid. Every glow follows real timing and real movement, so the film reads as a snowboard edit first and a piece of animation second.

The riders in Magic Flashlights

• Brendan Hayes
• Scott Stevens
• Chris Beresford
• Matty Mo
• Jesse Burtner
• Casey Wrightsman

Timberline Lodge and summer snowboarding on Mount Hood

Mount Hood is Oregon’s highest peak at 11,249 ft (3,429 m), a potentially active stratovolcano in the Cascade Range about 50 miles east-southeast of Portland. It carries 12 named glaciers and snowfields, and the most visited of them, Palmer Glacier, is what makes summer riding possible.

Timberline Lodge sits on the mountain’s south side at about 6,000 ft (1,829 m). It was built between 1936 and 1938 by the Works Progress Administration, using local craftsmen and materials, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated it on September 28, 1937. Film fans know its exterior as the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). The Timberline ski area, which reaches onto Palmer Glacier, offers the only year-round lift-served skiing in North America and is open to skiers and snowboarders in all 12 months. Its first chairlift, the Magic Mile, opened in November 1939.

That year-round snow is what makes a summer camp such as High Cascade possible. Other ski areas on the mountain include Mount Hood Meadows, Mount Hood Skibowl and Cooper Spur.

Planning a summer session on Mount Hood

Summer riding on Palmer is best early in the day, before the sun softens the snow. Bring sunscreen and goggles for strong high-altitude light, and check Timberline’s lift and park schedule before you go, since summer hours and terrain change with conditions.

Explore more: landscapes constructed for the camera, or a ski film with a more natural visual approach.

Related reading

• The Balance of Powder: A Sherpas Cinema Film
• Don’t Panic: A Snowboard Film Excerpt
• Chilean Andes Snowboarding: Funner Filete
• Valdez Heli-Skiing: H2O Guides in the Chugach
• A Lake Louise Snowboard Lap with Blayne Campbell
• Snowboarding and Freestyle in Finnish Lapland

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