Travel Channel | Top Secret Swimming Holes
This is where it all started.
Back in 2014, our founder Aaron shot a YouTube video for fun, an adventure with friends to Havasupai, the otherworldly waterfalls with bright blue waters on tribal land deep in the Grand Canyon and one of America's best-kept secrets at the time. He wasn't chasing a career in production. He was just posting videos he loved making.
Then a Travel Channel executive found that video. Impressed, the network reached out, acquired Aaron's footage, and turned it into a pilot. That one YouTube upload became the launch of a series built around exploring epic, hidden swimming holes across the country.
Aaron filmed the entire first season, "America's Secret Swimming Holes," on weekends while still working the office job he'd held for two decades. The show took off. Travel Channel took it global, renaming it "Top Secret Swimming Holes" and greenlighting three more seasons. Aaron went from weekend shoots in the U.S. to month-long expeditions in Bali, Australia, Japan, the Bahamas, the UK, and across Europe, chasing waterfalls, hidden hot springs, remote beaches, and the most jaw-dropping pools at luxury resorts. He filled two passports in about three years.
He eventually took a sabbatical to shoot seasons two, three, and four. By the time the series wrapped, having covered just about every secret swimming hole on the planet, one thing was clear: this was no longer a side project. It was the work he was meant to do. So he kept going, and Schwartzy was born.
The adventure continues.
This is Episode 1 of Season 1. Aaron, Schwartzy Founder, shot and casted this.
The Result
Four seasons around the U.S. and the globe, a hit for both Travel Channel and the production company that hired Aaron, proof that one YouTube video shot for fun can turn into a network series. The show performed well enough that the same production company has brought Aaron back for a number of projects since. Swimming Holes only wrapped when Discovery acquired Travel Channel during a wave of industry consolidation, and by then the series had already covered just about every secret swimming hole worth finding on the planet.
For Aaron, it was one of the best gigs in the business: travel the world, chase epic adventures, put it on TV, and make lifelong friends along the way. Hard to beat it.
