(exciting music) - Welcome to "Crosscut Now."

I'm Paris Jackson.

In today's episode, we dive into what it takes the director behind "Nick on the Rocks" to reach and capture the most impressive landscapes in Washington, and how you too at home can carve out some time to see those very places yourself.

I sat down with Brady Lawrence, a new director of "Nick on the Rocks" season five, to learn more about the production's fascinating secrets.

Welcome, Brady.

Thank you for joining us.

- Thanks for having me.

- You are one of the newest members of season five of "Nick on the Rocks," and you're wearing many hats, director of videographer and editor.

And you're following geology professor Nick Zentner around some amazing landscapes in Washington.

How do you decide on where to go, and you're crisscrossing the state essentially.

- Nick is absolutely the leader in terms of deciding where to go.

He at the beginning of the season gave me a long list of potential places that he's interested in, that he knows a lot about, and I kind of went through and sifted through and picked out some that I thought would be more interesting, and specifically I try to think about visual storytelling.

- What are the top three places you visited for season five, and why?

- So, I live here in Seattle and so about half the locations were in eastern Washington, and many in places that I had never been before.

And so one of the locations in particular that was really cool is this area called Moses Coulee.

It's really not a tourist destination at all.

It's mostly agricultural area, but it's just these giant sheer canyon walls with these things called hanging valleys where there used to be streams coming down and now ice age flooding created these crazy massive canyons.

And there's nobody out here.

Nobody's visiting this place.

There's just like a little BLM parking lot for like four cars.

And so that place I thought was mind-blowing just in general, but also especially 'cause just no one's going there.

And so that was one of my favorite places in eastern Washington.

On this side of the Cascades, we went to a place called Yellow Aster Butte that was really beautiful.

It's right by the Canadian border, and that's just really a special place.

That was the longest hike that we had to do.

It's in a protected wilderness, so we had to get really special permits to be able to film there.

And it was all to find this very specific type of rock that's 400 million years old and actually came from the bottom of the ocean and ended up high in the mountains.

And so it's this really unique rock.

So those are two really cool places that I got to go.

- One thing that's, again, so fascinating about this show is it's not just people that are living in the Pacific Northwest that are captivated by "Nick on the Rocks."

He has fans that are like thousands of miles away.

Kind of tell us about the vast viewership of "Nick on the Rocks."

- Yeah, so Nick himself has been a geology communicator for the last 30 years and has taken that very seriously.

And so through "Nick on the Rocks," through his personal channels, he's really built up quite the fervent fan base.

It's very impressive.

There are people who come to these sort of off the beaten path locations in eastern Washington because he has highlighted some special geological feature there.

- What does it take to pull off a show of this magnitude?

- Yeah, so it's an interesting show to shoot because we've opted, and per Nick's preference, it's just me and him and maybe one other person, and so for me that means that I've had to figure out how to put a full camera rig with gimbal sound, bring a tripod, keep it as compact as I possibly can, and then carry that gear however deep into the mountains.

It's a pretty exciting logistical thing to deal with.

And definitely, you know, every piece of gear you add in, you're like, okay, do I really want to carry a 100-pound pack up this mountain, or can I get it to 90, can I get it to 80 pounds?

So it makes it an interesting challenge to think about.

There are some things that are just really hard to access.

Like we shot an episode about Mount Shuksan, and to get onto Mount Shuksan would've been, you know, a multi-day endeavor crossing glaciers.

And so we instead opted to do a different hike up into a different mountain that had a similar rock.

And so it's always this decision-making process of how can we do this without it getting too dangerous or too extreme?

But, you know, still trying to find the best shots and tell the stories in a compelling way.

- It's not for the faint of heart.

You have to have a love and a desire to get out there.

And Nick, he has it all.

- Yeah, Nick is fearless to be sure.

Every now and then he'll be out looking, you know, on a rock on some outcrop with, you know, a 800-foot drop right by it.

And it's kind of like, please don't fall.

He never gets that close probably, but definitely not all hosts of shows I don't think would be as willing to go deep into the mountains like he is.

- Cool stuff.

Thank you so much for joining us, Brady.

- Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.

- And if you're interested in checking out season five of "Nick on the Rocks," it's airing now on KCTS 9.

(light music) I'm Paris Jackson.

Thank you for watching "Crosscut Now," your destination for nonprofit Northwest news.

Go to crosscut.com for more.

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