In 1980 a poet named Harold Dull floated a student in the warm pool at a half-ruined Victorian spa in the Mayacamas Mountains, applied the shiatsu stretches he'd learned in Japan, and invented a form of bodywork now practiced in more than forty countries. That is the kind of thing that happened at Harbin. It was never a nudist club—never joined a federation, never held a convention, never elected an Outdoor Club Person of the Year—and it became, for several decades, the most recognizable clothing-optional place in Northern California anyway. The Lake Miwok called the site eetawyomi, the hot place. Here's the place, and the improbable community that rose out of its springs and burned down with them.

The Place

Harbin sits in a high mountain canyon about two miles up a winding road from Middletown, in Lake County, roughly ninety miles northeast of San Francisco and just north of the Napa wine country. The terrain climbs steeply—visitors have reached for the same comparison for forty years, that you approach it the way you'd approach Delphi, walking upward through ascending foothills toward a sanctuary. The land runs from chaparral into open pine and oak forest, carved, as one account put it, from ancient volcanoes and the constant friction of the continental plates. That geology is the whole point: the same fissures that make the ground restless heat subterranean water and push it to the surface as soda, iron, and sulphur springs.

The Story

The springs were sacred ground to the Lake Miwok, who used eetawyomi for centuries before white settlement. By the tradition Harbin itself keeps, the paths to the springs were held as neutral territory—members of all nations knew they could come, use the healing waters, and abide in peace—and indigenous people gathered at a creekside “Grandmother’s Circle” for ceremony. After the Miwok were pushed out under Spanish and Mexican rule, the canyon passed through a series of land-grant owners more interested in ranching than soaking. An American, Archibald Ritchie, took over the grant in the 1850s and is said to have “discovered” the springs just before his death in 1856. James M. Harbin, who came to California in 1846, acquired the land in his wake and gave his name to both the water and the mountain above it; sources credit him with the springs from 1852 and place his buyout of a partner in 1860. In 1865 he sold to two Welsh immigrants, Richard Williams and Hugh Hughes, who saw the commercial possibility. By 1869 they could house a hundred guests, and around 1870 Williams formally established the Harbin Hot Springs Health and Pleasure Resort, a large hotel built on the slope below the springs, advertised as Northern California’s answer to Marienbad or Saratoga.

For the rest of the century it ran as a fashionable Victorian spa. Guests came by stagecoach—nine hours from San Francisco—and later by rail and automobile; the heavyweight champions James J. Jeffries and Bob Fitzsimmons trained in its gym, boxers swearing the clean air and altitude gave them harder workouts than the city. Fire was the recurring hazard: most of the resort burned in 1894 and was rebuilt larger, with a gym and bigger pools. When Lake County went dry in 1912, Harbin kept serving liquor on the sly, a practice it reportedly carried straight through federal Prohibition, with illegal slot machines running in the hotel into the 1940s. Then the rail lines faded, the Depression and two world wars came and went, the resort burned again in 1943 and was rebuilt as a weekend getaway—now with gender-segregated nude sunbathing on the grounds. When the county attached the property for back taxes in October 1960, the hotel burned within days, and a tangle of claimants fought over the title through the early ‘60s. Harbin limped along as a resort until about 1966, then closed to the public.

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The club is named for a wind. The chinook is the warm "snow-eater" that rolls down off the Rockies and can lift a January afternoon in southern Alberta forty degrees in an hour, melting the drifts and baring the ground. It is the right emblem for a club that has been buried and thawed out again more times than most survive: chased off rented farmland, flooded off its first owned acres, and in 1990 evicted from the ranch it had held for a quarter-century—and back on its feet each time. Seventy-plus years on, the members still drive out past Sundre in summer and still swim, in the dead of an Alberta winter, in a rented Calgary pool. Here's the place, and the wind it was named for.

The Place

The current grounds are a roughly 7-hectare parcel (18.5 acres as purchased in 1992), mostly wooded, about 12 km (7½ miles) north of Sundre in the Rocky Mountain foothills—roughly an hour and a half, or some 145 km (90 miles), northwest of Calgary. The defining feature is the James River, which the property fronts for about a quarter-mile and which supplies the club's informal river "nude beach." The plant is deliberately modest and camping-oriented: a clubhouse of about 110 square meters (1,200 square feet), a wash house with hot-water showers, RV sites with water and 30-amp power, a central sanitary dump, a hot-tub gazebo, an outdoor shower, a rental cottage, and a community garden of roughly 280 square meters. The season runs summer camping plus a winter that never fully closes—the club has kept up monthly nude swims at a rented Calgary pool since the late 1960s.

The Story

Sunny Chinooks begins with a name and a wind. By the club’s own account in Going Natural (Fall 1989), “a group of nine people decided it was time to make the club official and chose the name of Sunny Chinooks Association” in June 1952, affiliated with the American Sunbathing Association, and obtained a charter. The earliest primary trace matches that to the month: a Sunny Trails “Group Roll Call” for June 1952 records the decision in the club’s own voice—”We have decided to call our club the Sunny Chinooks and apply for registration under that name.” The early organizers were Bob and Jean Stratychuk of Calgary, Jean serving as first recorded secretary. The name honours the chinook wind; later AANR-era accounts credit Ray and Mildred Connett—the founders of California’s Glen Eden and themselves products of the BC scene—with suggesting it, though the 1952 source shows the club naming itself.

For its first years the club had no land and moved constantly: a 1952 site on “Mr. Cox’s farm on the Banff highway,” then a lease at Priddis and a purchase at High River, each lost in turn. The strain nearly finished it. Its own 1962 history records a 1958 collapse during which “we changed the name to San Helios in hopes that recent trouble would be forgotten.” The revival came in 1959, when Rod Flack—a member since 1956—was elected president, dropped the San Helios name, and restored the original.

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Behind the Iron Curtain, in a Catholic country run by communists, a swimming instructor from Munich built what became one of the largest naturist resorts in Europe—on a signed German tourism contract, with the blessing of the League of Communists and over the objection of the Church. Most nudist travelers have heard of Cap d'Agde and Sylt. Almost nobody outside Croatia knows the stranger, better-documented story of the place that came first. Here it is.

The Place

A naturist resort on the northwest Istrian coast, near the small town of Vrsar, built around a pine-covered islet at the mouth of the Lim Bay. The grounds run to roughly 100 hectares (about 250 acres) with some five kilometers of coastline; the original islet is still linked to the mainland by a bridge. Since the 2025 season the resort has been split by a two-meter wall into two sectors: a naturist side toward the bay and a larger clothed side at the town entrance. It opens seasonally, late April into October.

The Story

Local legend says the first nude bather on Koversada was Casanova, who supposedly hid out at Vrsar in the 18th century while dodging the Venetian authorities and stripped off on the island. The documented story is younger, and it begins with a man in a car. Rudolf Halbig, a swimming instructor from Munich and a naturist, spent the late 1950s driving the Adriatic coast looking for somewhere West German naturists could take a holiday, and found an uninhabited pine islet beside a sleepy Istrian town that lived on wine, olive oil, and hazelnuts. Halbig ran a travel agency, Miramare, described in period sources as the first agency in the world to specialize in naturist travel. His local partner was Mate Restović, who directed the Vrsar tourist society. The two struck a deal in 1960, and an agreement signed in April 1961 committed Halbig to send up to four hundred German naturists a year. The first guests came in 1961, ferried out to the island by boat. Demand outran the islet fast, and in 1965 the resort spread onto the mainland shore.

Koversada is widely credited as Europe’s first commercial naturist camp, the model that turned Yugoslavia into a naturist-tourism capital of the continent.

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Texas isn’t the first state you’d expect to hold the line on public nudity. It did though—once, in one place, on a slab of limestone west of Austin. Hippie Hollow is the only legally recognized clothing-optional public park in the state, and it survives because the right people, at a handful of decisive moments, declined to shut it down.

The Place

A steep shoreline on the north side of Lake Travis, thirty minutes west of downtown Austin. There’s no sand. The slope is rock, and you pick your way down it to reach the water, farther in the dry years when the lake sits low. Cedar and oak above, open water below, the Hill Country running off in every direction.

The Story

Hippie Hollow exists because of a dam. The Lower Colorado River Authority broke ground on Mansfield Dam in 1937, impounded the Texas Colorado River, and created Lake Travis—a sixty-five-mile reservoir with a ragged shoreline the LCRA was obligated to open to the public. Most of those access points became boat launches and swimming beaches. The old McGregor goat ranch, all steep rock ledges, was useless for any of that. So it sat undeveloped: a graded parking lot and a path down to the water, free and unsupervised.

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That gap is what inspired Waypoints.

At Planet Nude we report on this world every week. Waypoints turns that same reporting on a single place at a time—digging through the archives, the court records, and the people who were there to assemble a history nobody else has bothered to.

A waypoint is a fixed point you navigate by, the thing you steer toward and find your bearings against when you’ve drifted. Every other Wednesday you get a new Waypoint—our field guide to a single place, told in full, so you can actually find it and know it before you go. We tell you what it really is: the true history, the culture, who built it, what happened there, what threatens it now. And we tell you how to get there. What it costs, the rules, who to call, when to show up.

That second part is harder than it sounds, and getting it wrong has a cost. You drive two hours to a beach that’s been off-limits since last season. You show up to a club on the one weekend it’s members-only. You bring your kids to a place that went eighteen-and-over years ago. Rules change, beaches shrink, owners turn over—and the internet keeps showing you the old answer. We check, so you arrive knowing instead of guessing. And maybe you find a few places you’d never have found on your own.

It’s researched, not crowd-sourced, and we don’t smooth over the hard parts. Take a place like Rooster Rock, in the Columbia Gorge—the family-friendly state park whose name was sanded down from the blunter thing locals actually called it, Cock Rock, after a Chinook landmark. That’s real, citable Oregon history, and the kind of thing that gets dropped from the official version. When the sources disagree, we say so. When a founding story turns out to be a myth, we give you the real one. So even a place you’ve been to a dozen times, you’ll come away knowing something you didn’t.

And it doesn’t vanish when you’ve read it. Every Waypoint joins a growing library you keep access to—dozens of places, researched and mapped, that you can return to whenever you need them. A reference you actually use: when you’re planning a trip, deciding whether a place is worth the drive, or settling who’s right about its history. You’re not subscribing to an email. You’re building something, one place at a time, that gets more useful every issue it grows.

Here is how it fits together, because nothing changes about what you already have. Planet Nude stays free. The weekly Orbit keeps coming. Strips keeps coming. Everything you read now, you keep reading, at no cost. Waypoints is something different—a researched field guide that builds into a library you can access any time—and that part is for paid members. If you’re already a paid member, you don’t have to do anything. Waypoints is already yours, starting this week. It’s new, and it’s included. And however you read Planet Nude, you stay in control of what lands in your inbox. Whether you want Waypoints, the Orbit, Strips, or any other section we run, you can manage all of it at www.planetnude.co/account—turn sections on, turn them off, and customize exactly what you get.

So that’s the honest pitch. This is slow work—the archives, the court files, the long phone calls with people who were directly involved—and a membership is what makes room for it. The places outlast the people who made them, but the stories usually don’t. Waypoints is our attempt to write them down before they’re gone, so the next person who stands on that sand knows what they’re standing on—and your membership is what keeps that work going.

The first Waypoint lands this week. 🪐

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