The crew of four that turned Huckberry’s YouTube into appointment television

A place, a chef, one meal

DIRT began with a direct message on Instagram. Kate West had worked with Josh Rosen, a former pro snowboarder and a co-founder of Saturdays NYC, at STOKED, the New York nonprofit that takes city kids to the mountains, the ocean and the skate park. She wrote to ask whether he remembered her. What the two of them sketched is still the show. “We’d go to a place, we’d meet a chef, and we’d gather ingredients and cook everything up at the end,” West says. Every episode since has added to it.

They pitched Japan for the first one. In West’s telling, Huckberry’s answer was “Hard no. You have basically no budget.” So the first DIRT was shot in Rosen’s backyard, Seattle, in the off-season, and released in March 2022. “I got that first edit back from David at WRKSHRT,” West says, “and it just was like, ‘Holy sh*t, this is gonna work.’”

Japan came two years later, as three episodes.

DIRT Hawaiʻi, May 2026: the eighteenth episode, and the founding crew’s last. Directed by Kate West, shot by WRKSHRT, music by Actual Magic. Courtesy of Huckberry

The trifecta

West holds every episode to three things: an adventure, an ingredient and a human. The third is where she starts. “That’s where my curiosity starts,” she says, and it is usually how the crew finds the place. In Ireland, a chef named Jess, who left New Zealand for Galway eighteen years earlier, sent them out past Inishmore to pull crab pots with one of her restaurant’s suppliers. That episode has been watched more than 2.7 million times.

In Kyushu the human was Yosuke Fujimori, a farmer whose plot of yamaimo, a sticky Japanese mountain yam, sits beside a Shinto shrine. Before the dig he prayed at the shrine “for the success of shooting DIRT in Japan,” and the conversation that followed turned to Shinto, nature and ancestry. West remembers the moment physically. “I got goosebumps all over my body,” she says. To her it was “the whole point of the show. We’re all connected.”

You can tell a story about a place, but no one knows a place better than the people that live there and love it.

KATE WEST — CREATOR AND DIRECTOR, DIRT

Four people

“Even those scrappy independent films I worked on had like a crew of at least 30 people on set,” West says. DIRT travels with four: West, Rosen, and David Cleeland and Wade Dunstan of WRKSHRT, a production company from Jackson Hole. She calls the two shooters “mountain kids that grew up in the mountains making homemade skate and snowboard videos,” and on the road they cover camera, stills, audio, the drone and the driving. West carries pre-production. Dunstan runs the gear on set, and Cleeland carries the edit. Rosen’s job, in his words, “is sort of to be myself.”

Rosen compares the shooters to Ginger Rogers, who did everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in heels: the same day as everyone else, carrying the rig. The days are long in ways the episodes hide. The crew sees at least two people and two adventures a day, and leaves room for the shots of the place itself. “When you see the show, it looks really cruisy and the music is cruising,” Rosen says. Inside that car he is four hours into the drive, “on my fourth coffee. And everyone’s threatening to quit.”

The same four made all eighteen episodes, from Seattle to Hawaiʻi.

The cut and the score

“My dear friend who makes documentaries said that in the editing process you die and then are reborn,” Rosen says. He didn’t fully understand it until he watched the crew’s own. West and Cleeland talk “probably four hours a day, every day” through post, and her notes on each episode end as what she calls “a Google Doc of a madwoman.” She knows an episode is finished when “the characters in the episode are proud of how they’ve been represented.”

The score has its own lineage. From New York, the fourth episode, the music has come from Actual Magic: the composers Tom Van Buskirk and George Langford, with the DJ duo Chances With Wolves, Kenan Juska and Justin Cox, on music supervision. Rosen was a fan of the duo’s New York radio show. West’s brief to the composers, as Langford tells it in the Huckberry Journal, was four words: “Dreamy surf music. Go.” The Japan episodes became a record, The Best of DIRT Vol. 1: Japan.

The adventure continues

The founding crew’s run closed with Hawaiʻi in May 2026. At fifty minutes it is more than three times the length of the Seattle pilot. By then the eighteen episodes had drawn nearly 25 million views on YouTube, and DIRT Colorado had been nominated for a 2025 James Beard Media Award in Commercial Media. That July, the Huckberry channel passed 500,000 subscribers.

In September, Huckberry handed DIRT to a new host and a new crew. Zach Chance of Jamestown Revival, who paddled the Devils River with Ben O’Meara in one of the brand’s first YouTube films, now hosts. Jonathan Desabris, who produced Hawaiʻi, directs. DIRT Finland, the nineteenth episode, still ends at the table. Rosen, in Huckberry’s words, is “off to another incredible adventure.” O’Meara’s send-off says what the four of them built: “DIRT simply wouldn’t exist without what he poured into it. But Josh would be the first to tell you: DIRT was never about him.”

Eighteen episodes, nearly 25 million views, and one test before any of them shipped: whether the people on screen would be proud of how they were shown.

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