Introducing Waypoints

A new section for paid members. A field guide to the places where people go to be free of their clothes—their histories, their fights, and how to find them. A new one every other Wednesday.

You know these places. Maybe you’ve been to a few. A beach at the end of a cliff trail, a hot spring someone told you about. And if you’re honest, you don’t really know them; not the way you’d like to. You find some detail online about the parking or the vibe or which end of the beach to walk to. You don’t know how the beach came to be or who fought for it, what it cost them, or how close it came to being lost. Almost nobody does. And the people who do are getting older.

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.

The at-a-glance card that opens every Waypoint—checked, and dated.

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. 🪐

Become a paid member now to get every Waypoint from the first one.