Page, Arizona, is home to a rising YouTube star named Whitey, a rambunctious cattle dog who loves exploring the outdoors in northern Arizona and southern Utah.

Whitey’s escapades are featured on the Whitey’s World YouTube channel, billed as a travel guide to Page and surrounding region. Destinations and events featured so far have included Buckskin Gulch, Lees Ferry, Grosvenor Arch, Horseshoe Bend by kayak, Page Lake Powell Balloon Regatta and even Golliard Dog Park in Page.

Nearly 40 videos have been  posted since June 2022. In the past year, the channel has attracted more than 10,000 subscribers and is approaching 300,000 views. 

The man behind Whitey’s World is J. J. McMahon, a Page resident who works as an outdoor guide at Amangiri Resort and who describes himself as Whitey’s “human chauffeur.” 

As McMahon tells it, the impetus behind the videos was a combination of lessons learned from personal failures, more recent battles with depression, and deep love for his dog. 

First, the failures: In the late 1980s, McMahon attended Flagstaff High School, where he had a shot at being a state champion in wrestling but lost in the finals in front of thousands of people.  

“You know what it’s like when you have 8,000 people sitting there and you’re not the guy getting your hand held up,” McMahon said. “You know how humbling it is when you’re good and you find out there’s other levels to this game – to whatever game you’re in, whatever proclivity or sport.”

After graduating high school in 1990, he attended college in northern Colorado, this time with the goal of becoming a Division 1 All-American wrestler. It was another dream that failed to pan out. He then moved to Tucson for graduate school, with thoughts of pursuing medical school or law school. 

Instead, in a turn of luck, he met somebody who knew somebody who helped him get Fortune 500 sales and marketing training, which, in turn, helped him land a job in the sport medicine industry in Scottsdale. It was a lucrative career, and he was excited about working with cutting-edge technology, but after a few years he realized he wasn’t finding value in the work anymore.

“Basically, I woke up one day – it’s going to sound very cliché – but woke up around 2008 and just didn’t find the value in what I was doing anymore,” McMahon said. “So, I took my 401K, everything I was not supposed to do fiscally, and just travelled the world. I was just opening up a map, and wherever my finger landed I would go to. I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have anybody I had to depend on me, and so I started travelling.” 

He spent a year trotting the globe, seeing and experiencing many new things, but “failure” continued to dog him when he lost an eye in a bar fight in Taiwan.

When McMahon returned to the U.S., he needed something to do. In graduate school, he had worked for an extension of the Outward Bound program called Expedition Therapy, which mentored at-risk youth and took them on backpacking excursions. He remembered how much he had enjoyed working outdoors during that time. When he was younger, his family had also spent vacations at Lake Powell, so in 2010 McMahon headed for the familiar territory of Page.  

He soon landed a job with Adventure Partners, the company that supplies guide services at Amangiri Resort. He also convinced two of his best friends from childhood to move to Page to work outdoors.  

In early 2020, shortly before the COVID pandemic swept across the world, life was good: McMahon had the perfect job, his two best friends lived within easy walking distance of his home, and he was three years into a relationship with a woman he thought he might marry. His girlfriend also had a cattle dog to which McMahon had grown a strong attachment. 

“And then life hit,” McMahon said. “Mom died, sister died, the relationship ended, and though we didn’t have children, we had the dog that I loved very much. I had a deep emotional contact with the dog, and that was gone.” 

He felt angry and empty, and for the first time in his life, deep depression hit.

“I had dealt with failure in my life. Struggle and attempting difficult tasks in life reaps amazing benefits. There’s something about failure and loss that teaches you a lot when you’re a young man,” he said. 

“But I always thought loss/failure and depression were the same, but I was very wrong. I had always kept my emotions close to the vest – real men don’t cry. My older brothers were tough guys: martial arts, kickboxing, hockey players, and dad and brother had proudly served. The McMahon boys didn’t cry – that was our mantra.” 

To help him cope with his depression, McMahon contacted Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab in search of the same breed of dog that his ex-girlfriend had owned. It wasn’t long before they called him back – they had a one-year-old heeler cattle dog, which McMahon adopted and named Whitey.  

This was around the time the COVID pandemic started, during which Amangiri’s guide services were suspended for about three months. This gave McMahon extra time to learn how to properly care for an energetic cattle dog who needed at least 2 to 4 miles of exercise day.   

Life went on. Amangiri reopened after a brief closure, and one day in November 2020, McMahon found himself deep in conversation with a couple who were staying at the resort and for whom he had been serving as an outdoor guide for four or five days. The woman was a well-known psychologist, and her husband worked in the social media sector.  

“We were four or five days into our time together, we start talking about family and life and everything,” McMahon said, adding that the psychologist basically gave him free therapy over a couple days. For the first time, he dug into aspects of his family history that he had never processed. 

“I told her about what was going on in my life: Mom passed away, sister passed away, broke up with my girlfriend. I had two sibling suicides in the family and then another sibling overdose, problems with depression, violence, alcoholism and substance abuse – all things I had not even thought about because I thought I had to be a tough guy, that I had to be an alpha male,” he said. “I had always taken things out physically rather than mentally challenge myself for reasons that I know now were not correct.”

The psychologist and her husband also pointed out that McMahon often talked about all the fun activities and excursions he shared with his dog Whitey. They suggested he start making videos of his adventures with his dog and post them on YouTube. 

At first, McMahon resisted the idea on the grounds that he was not savvy enough about making videos or posting on YouTube to make it work. Also, years before, he had left his well-paying sport medicine job to move to Page and work as an outdoor guide. He had little interest in being dragged back into the online world.

Still, the idea was attractive. His personal experiences travelling the globe had shown him that the Page area was easily among the most beautiful places on the planet. Posting videos on YouTube would allow him to introduce people to the region he loved so much. 

“I’ll put southern Utah and northern Arizona up against anything on this planet. It’s spectacular, right?” McMahon said. “There are people from all over the world who come to Amangiri – people who can afford to go anywhere – and daily they say, ‘Hey J. J., this is some of the most amazing country we’ve ever seen.”

At the psychologist’s suggestion, McMahon started recording videos using his mobile phone. He stored the videos on a hard drive, but didn’t get around to editing them, much less posting them online. Then, in May of 2021, the psychologist contacted McMahon to follow up and see whether he was pursuing the video project as part of his “therapy.” 

“She said, ‘I know you got the physical aspects of it, the punching bag and working out, but the mental portion, I think this would really help,’” McMahon said. “I said, ‘Oh yeah, I didn’t fully commit, but I got some video.’ She goes, ‘Hey, promise me within the next couple months you’ll work in it.’”

And so he did, creating the Whitey’s World YouTube channel and posting his first content – a 7-minute video about Lees Ferry – in June 2022. Despite not know much about how YouTube algorithms worked, the first video struck a chord with viewers, which led McMahon to believe that maybe he could continue making video for fun on the side. The second video, on hiking the Toadstools trail in southern Utah, was even more popular.

With each new video, his skillset increased a little bit, and he eventually found someone to help with editing. He also upgraded his mobile phone but decided that investing in high-end video equipment was a step too far. 

“Being a little bit older and wiser, I came full circle back to the fact that I didn’t want to make this a second job,” McMahon said. “We did it just for fun, but I was also passionate about introducing people to this part of the country because I think it’s the most spectacular topography on the planet.”

Three months and 15 videos later, McMahon posted a video titled “The Moon,” covering the area within the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument along Smokey Mountain Road, which is accessed from Big Water. The video was his biggest hit so far, attracting more than 36,000 views as of last week. 

“For a small channel with a guy who has no idea what he’s doing and just his dog out having fun, it’s really cool,” McMahon said.

As the Whitey’s World audience has grown, McMahon has been contacted by several schools indicating that they would like to use his videos as part of their school curriculum. Locally, teachers at Glen Canyon Outdoor Academy have been showing Whitey’s World videos in class, and McMahon has been asked to go out on field trips – along with Whitey – with kids at the school next year. He’s also been contacted by a school as far away as Hanover, Minnesota, to inform him that they’re using Whitey’s World videos in the curriculum.

“It’s really cool because I’m giving back to the community,” McMahon said. “Whitey’s World started off as just a marketing resource for everything Page, Arizona, [and the] surrounding area, but it has morphed into an educational resource, which has been extremely rewarding. Bringing tourism to Page, while simultaneously educating our youth. Love it!”

McMahon is now aiming to post at least two videos a month, while at the same time avoiding turning the project into a “big production” involving too much tedious work. And although McMahon is the one who creates the videos, he insists that Whitey is the star. 

“Whitey’s World and the love of a pooch,” he said. “When the relationship [with my ex-girlfriend] ended, that was a gaping hole in my heart that could only be filled by another pooch. I still miss the other pooch daily, but Whitey really helped fill that hole. I hadn’t addressed a lot of other things. That was just the crescendo of a lot of other things going on in my life.” 

McMahon’s journey has taught him plenty about dealing with failure and depression, which he says are two completely different things. He experienced the former at an early age when he fell just short of becoming state wrestling champion in high school. But he thought he was immune to depression until it hit him following the series of misfortunes in early 2020.  

“I always want to tell younger men, because it’s so tough to be a young man these days, is that you can talk to somebody, whether it’s your friends or your family or a clinician,” McMahon said. “Don’t be afraid to talk to somebody about your problems in life. And everybody has a story to tell. You just have to sit down and talk to them. It’s pretty interesting.”

He knows he was lucky, at a key time in his life, to meet the psychologist and her husband, who heard what he had to say and suggested he focus on his dog and his YouTube channel. It has helped him come full circle and at the same time provide a benefit to people from all over the world.

“It’s just a beautiful path,” he said. “We’re all on our own journey. Having this relationship with my dog, since I don’t have children of my own, it’s a big relationship. Those of us that have dogs in our life, we know how passionate, what a loving relationship that is with a pet.”