A Hollow Bone Initiative Docuseries
THE DEER TRAIL
What happens when your answers stop working?
Directed by Jackson Averett
Created by Craig Rose and Jackson Averett
Stay Curious · Episode One
THE DEER TRAIL
What's the price of belonging?
Leave the map. Follow the signal.
A Camp Mary Story
Someone sees something in you.
Then what?
Before the record. Before the book. Before the company. Before anybody applauds.
Sometimes someone sees what is inside you before you have the courage to claim it yourself.
The Deer Trail, Episode One of the Stay Curious docuseries, follows two gatherings at Camp Mary in the mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina, where artists, entrepreneurs, fathers, sons, elders, healers, skeptics and seekers entered the same house without being given much of a map.
Some came to create. Some came to listen. Some came because somebody they trusted told them to show up. Some still weren't sure what they had walked into an hour after arriving.
Over two Camp Mary gatherings, something began taking shape. Not a program. Not a doctrine. Not another retreat people were being sold.
A room. A field. A question: What might become possible if we believed in people before the outcome was known?
This is not a series about one artist. It is a series about what happens when a room full of people are given belief, space and permission — and whether they will finally release what they came carrying.
Because receiving belief isn't the finish line. Release is.
Open Heart
Live from Camp Mary · Shope Creek Wilderness
Open Heart · Live from Camp Mary
Camp Mary · A look inside the gathering
An hour captured live at Camp Mary.
Music is not background to The Deer Trail. It is one of its primary languages. The Camp Mary footage contains approximately an hour of me performing across two distinct bodies of work.
I also return to the Mormon songs that formed part of my earliest understanding of faith, family and purpose. Not as parody. Not pretending the difficult parts of that inheritance don't exist. I bring the music forward and ask what is still beautiful enough to keep.
Two bodies of music. One artist. One name.
Six stops. No straight line.
The doorman. The catalyst. The artist.
Stephen calls himself a storyteller, an author and a doorman. "I'm a doorman. I open doors."
After a successful business career that included co-founding SRS Labs, Stephen left the business world and spent decades exploring consciousness, exchange, possibility and what happens when people are given room to discover something for themselves.
He and Mary opened Shope Creek Wilderness without building the relationship around what they would receive in return. That experience helped form two questions that sit underneath the series: Can we move beyond fear? Can we shift the nature of exchange?
Craig spent decades traveling, speaking, building movements, producing experiences and putting unlikely people in the same room. Nearly three million miles. Churches. Conferences. Nonprofits. Artists. Entrepreneurs. And eventually Asheville.
What changed wasn't the instinct. It was the role. Less preacher. More connector. Less telling people what the path is. More helping create a room where they might discover their own.
That tension sits underneath The Deer Trail: What happens after somebody believes in you? Do you keep waiting? Or do you ship?
Patricc doesn't wait for perfect. He paints. He creates. He destroys. He paints over it. He calls himself the Anti-Artist Artist.
At Camp Mary, art doesn't sit on a wall waiting to be interpreted. It happens in the room.
"I'm not making magic. I'm just being a freaking kid and having fun." That idea runs throughout the series: Maybe everybody is carrying an artist. The medium changes. The invitation doesn't.
What do we inherit? What do we keep? What ends with us?
Some of the most unexpected moments at Camp Mary have nothing to do with technology, spirituality or business. They're about fathers.
A son seeing his father's life differently. A father realizing what his own father protected him from. Men asking whether they have been the fathers they hoped they would become.
I carry the name of my father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Stephen navigates his own father-son story.
Different generations sitting in the same room, discovering that inheritance isn't only money or belief. Sometimes what gets passed down is fear. Sometimes love. Sometimes silence. Sometimes somebody becomes the shield.
The episode becomes
the invitation.
The Deer Trail joins Billy Loves Willie, a 40-day campaign to save hemp, with screenings and live music at the Elk Horn Lounge in Asheville. Select dates, Nov 1 – Dec 11, 2026. 21+.
I'll perform the songs whose creation audiences just witnessed. The episode will be screened in the city where the trail ultimately led. The Hollow Bone Initiative begins stepping out of philosophy and into public life.
Artists, builders, elders, families, and communities will be invited into the story.
And for forty days, the line between docuseries and real life disappears.
Follow the series.
Hollow Bone is funding and completing Episode One of the Stay Curious docuseries. Jackson Averett is leading the edit, going through the archive to find the episode that is actually there — not the one anyone planned, but the one that happened in the room. The target is a watchable rough cut by Halloween. The ambition isn't simply to finish an episode. It's to let the gatherings speak for themselves, and let that momentum help fill the Well for the series that comes next.
We are not waiting for a label, producer or distributor to tell us whether this is worth making. Those conversations can happen around the work. They don't need to hold it up.
Select Dates at the Elk Horn Lounge
Select appearances at the Elk Horn Lounge at Elkhorn Canna Co., 278 Haywood Rd, Asheville, NC. Nov 1 – Dec 11, 2026. Select dates. 21+.
Part of Billy Loves Willie, a 40-day campaign to save hemp.
The Deer Trail is Episode One of Stay Curious — a docuseries about following something before you fully understand where it leads.
Because deer do not follow highways. They follow paths almost no one else can see.
And sometimes, those are the paths that lead us home.
Part of Stay Curious
A docuseries · 10 chapters
What happens when your answers stop working? Stay Curious is a Hollow Bone Initiative docuseries following the gatherings, the questions, and the people who refuse to stay where they were told.
A Hollow Bone Initiative Docuseries
Stay Curious
The Deer Trail is Episode One of Stay Curious — a Hollow Bone Initiative docuseries. Sanctuaries, accessible healing, residencies, and nature education without beginning with "what can you afford?"