Joe and Joy Baisch were the guides for the first Hiking with a Local video showcasing the Dosewallips River Road Trail. Photo from Greg Brotherton.
In addition to being a County Commissioner for District 3 in Jefferson County and on the board of the North Hood Canal Chamber of Commerce, Greg Brotherton is a storyteller. He’s written fiction, screenplays, and many silly songs that he claims to play badly on a host of different instruments. And at one point, he spent a year working as a filmmaker — something he now does for fun and out of an interest in telling visual stories.
Joy Baisch points out a log along the the Dosewallips River Road Trail while Greg Brotherton films the first Hiking with a Local video. Photo from Greg Brotherton.
Greg, his wife, Stacey, and their daughter, Sage, moved to the area in 2011. Their goal was to be closer to their food — to raise and grow as much of it as possible. Today the family does just that, growing vegetables, keeping bees, and raising goats, chickens, and other animals on their small hobby permaculture farm near Lake Leland.
Greg claims that Stacey is really the farmer and that he builds fences and oversees the infrastructure. While this lifestyle means that he spends a lot of time outdoors, Greg doesn’t hike recreationally as much as he’d like to. The opportunity to do so was one of the benefits of his latest storytelling project: Hiking with a Local, a three-video series featuring local guides sharing their knowledge and experience on trails with which they have a personal connection.
It’s a project that Greg began thinking about in early 2021. “At the Chamber, we were exploring ways to bring local culture to some of the internationally known trails in our region and I came up with the idea for a series of videos,“ explains Greg. “I liked the idea of being able to get out on the trail with interesting people and learn more about a particular trail from them.”
Something that got the project moving was a Spark Joy Grant from Better Living through Giving and the Jefferson Community Foundation. “They were looking for a south county project to support, so I applied. You could say that the Spark Joy Grant was the spark that got us started.”
Launching the drone during filming of the first Hiking with a Local video. Photo from Greg Brotherton.
Greg volunteered his time for the project. The grant funding covered the cost of equipment, project expenses, and the music used in the videos. It also allowed him to pay an intern.
Greg says the guides for each video are people he encounters who have a passion for hiking in the area and a particular trail. The guides choose the trails and share their local connection. As Greg hikes with them and films, he’s looking for the hook and the essence of a story so that the trail comes alive for the viewer.
“Discovering why these particular people are hiking these particular trails is one of the things that most interests me about this project,” explains Greg.
The first Hiking with a Local video features Joe and Joy Baisch as they share their knowledge and experience hiking the Dosewallips River Road Trail near Brinnon, Washington. In the mid-1990s, Joy and Joe were the concessionaires who ran the Elkhorn Campground for the USDA Forest Service.
Josh Mahan as he hikes the Mount Walker Trail during filming of the second Hiking with a Local video with Greg Brotherton filming from behind. Photo from Greg Brotherton.
An added bonus of the project for Greg was the opportunity to work with Ewen LeRest, whom he’d met while volunteering at Quilcene School on a project to film the school’s production of Hamlette (a twisty-turny comedic interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic Danish tale with a female lead) during Covid. At the time, Ewen was a very talented student at Quilcene School. He has since graduated and is working as a photographer for the Leader. For the Hiking with a Local project, Ewan worked as an intern doing some of the filming and providing all of the titles, special effects, and graphics.
The three videos in the series feature music by Samara Jade, a local musician and songwriter who has gotten a lot of inspiration for her songs from time spent along the Duckabush River. Samara’s actually the guide in the third Hiking with a Local video.
Greg hopes to do more Hiking with a Local videos because he’s enjoying producing them. About the creation process he says that finding the guides who have that local connection to a particular trail is critical. Once the guide is identified and selects the trail, each video requires at least two filming days by him and Ewan and then about 20 hours of post-production time.
“Discovering why these particular people are hiking these particular trails is one of the things that most interests me about this project.” — Greg Brotherton
“Discovering why these particular people are hiking these particular trails is one of the things that most interests me about this project.”
— Greg Brotherton
