MoonGroove survives and thrives in its first year at White Thorn Lodge
Two natural disasters and one unforgettable weekend, courtesy of the amazing MoonGroove crew.
MoonGroove turned six years old this July, and celebrated by moving to a bigger home, packing in a full slate of music, art, yoga, and sports, and surviving two separate rounds of extreme weather in the process. Wildfire smoke blanketed the site for the first couple of days, and a round of severe thunderstorms tore through on Saturday. Neither one stopped the festival from delivering one of the best weekends I have had at a naturist event in years.
My wife Kim, our son Eli, and I flew into Pittsburgh direct from Las Vegas on Wednesday night and spent that first night at a La Quinta near the airport. Thursday morning we Ubered out to Butler to pick up a rental RV, then made our way onto the grounds of White Thorn Lodge that afternoon. This was the festival’s first year at White Thorn, a longtime nudist club in Darlington that has hosted the naked volleyball Superbowl for more than five decades. MoonGroove had outgrown its old home at Penn Sylvan in Mohnton and needed the extra acreage.
The festival itself ran four stages across four days, with more than 50 performers between them. Big Something headlined Friday night, SunSquabi closed out Saturday with direct support from Sneezy, and a rotating lineup of jam bands, funk acts, and DJs filled the hours around them. Beyond the music, there were yoga sessions morning and afternoon, volleyball and pickleball tournaments, bocce and cornhole, guided hikes and trail runs, a full slate of wellness workshops, a dedicated Women’s Moon Lounge, and a kids program called Club Nebula for the younger groovers on site. It is a lot to pull off in one weekend, and even with the weather working against it, the festival mostly delivered on all of it.
At check-in, the first familiar face we ran into was Eli Porr, one of the festival’s five founders and its executive director. I have known Eli for a couple of years now, and he has been on my podcast, New Nudist Podcast, at least three times, but this was the first time we had ever met in person. In addition to being a prolific promoter of exciting nudist projects and a really wonderful human, he is also the reason my son, also named Eli, fielded the same joke all weekend. Sharing a name with the festival’s own organizer never got old for the people who met him.
Planet Nude sponsored MoonGroove last year too, but 2026 was the first year we could actually make it out. We set up a vendor table for the weekend, and I spent a good chunk of my time there rather than out at the stages.
The smoke got there before we did. Wildfire smoke from Canada had settled over a wide stretch of the country that week, and Pennsylvania sat right in its path. The haze hung over the site through Thursday and Friday, thick enough to notice and thick enough to change the color of the light.
Those first couple of days were where the festival really delivered for me, though it had little to do with the weather or even the music and events. I met Tom Francine of SkinnyDipDay.org in person for the first time, and we ended up talking for a long stretch in a hot tub late one night. I met Justin and Nikki from Nude Lease on Life, Max and Luke from NAC/NEF, and Sandy and Charlie from AANR East. I had known every one of these people for years online, through Zoom calls, Discord threads, WhatsApp messages, and the occasional collaboration, but had never actually met any of them face to face. It is a strange feature of the modern naturist world that a community this active and this connected can still be scattered across the country and the world, coming together in person only at a handful of gatherings each year. I had the same experience at the INF-FNI Congress in Zipolite back in 2024, and it happened again and again at MoonGroove.
Friday and Saturday, I sat on a pair of nudist Q&A panels that had been built into the festival schedule, alongside representatives from NAC/NEF, AANR, and several other clubs and sponsor organizations in the space. A number of people came up to me afterward, or at other points over the weekend, to say they read Planet Nude or listen to Naked Age or New Nudist Podcast. It is only ever at events like this that people recognize my voice before they recognize my face, and it still catches me off guard every time. The day it happens to me at a grocery store, I do not know what I will do with myself.
Saturday brought the storms. A cold front pushed through with severe thunderstorms that afternoon, and for a few hours the forecast had all of it: damaging wind, hail, even a tornado watch for parts of the state. Rain came down hard enough to pause the festival outright. Watching the sky go that dark and that loud in the middle of a crowd is not entirely comfortable, but it did not feel unwelcome either. It gave the day a kind of danger that made the evening feel more earned once it arrived.
The skies cleared that evening, and the day’s delayed schedule pushed the main stage well into the night. I had spent most of the weekend at our vendor booth and had not caught much live music up to that point, so after the rain let up I went back to our RV in Cosmic Flats, the semi-quiet camping area, and fell asleep for a few hours. I woke up close to midnight to a clear sky and the bass thumping down the hill from the main stage. I walked up and caught SunSquabi headlining, the first time all weekend I saw the fire dancers working the crowd alongside a full light show. After two days of smoke and one dramatic storm, it felt like the release the whole weekend had been building toward, and it turned out to be the peak of the festival. Things wound down from there.
Sunday had a slower, more social pace, and it gave me time to appreciate the people holding the whole thing together. Eli Porr was everywhere all weekend, checking in with people individually, handling smoke and storms and every logistical headache with a level head, and still answering a text about the vendor wifi password in the middle of it all. Nicky, who runs the festival’s Club Nebula kids programming, kept a genuinely watchful eye on the younger crowd the entire time. Jim Dickey and Claude Richards of NAC/NEF showed up as they always do, two of the most dependable advocates and friends our community has. Jim in particular seemed to know everyone, everywhere, and at 72 he was still bouncing around the volleyball court and working the crowd with the energy of someone a third his age.
None of it runs without the crew behind it, and MoonGroove has a big one. A small group of founders started this thing a few years back, and dozens of volunteers have since taken over everything from sound and electrical to site operations, green room and VIP, art installations, and security. Every one of them was still smiling and helpful when I crossed paths with them, even after a weekend of smoke, storms, and very little sleep. That is not a small thing to pull off.
Having Kim and (little) Eli there changed the trip for me. I do a lot of this traveling alone, for work and for the movement both, so doing this one as a family felt like a small kind of catharsis. Eli made fast friends with the other kids there, spent most of his waking hours in the pool playing keepy-uppy with a beach ball, and became something of a mascot for the weekend between the name joke and a small kid running around with an all-over tan. He came home with more high fives, ice pops, and free scoops of ice cream than I could keep track of.
Our own weekend was one small piece of something much bigger. Here are the final stats for this year: MoonGroove pulled 1,246 people through the gate over the weekend, drawing from 29 states and as far away as Canada, Australia, the Bahamas, and France. That included roughly 707 ticketed guests, 93 volunteers, 130 musicians, 32 vendors, and 15 sponsors, all held together by a founding and staff team of about 30 people. Amazing!
We packed up Monday, drove back through Butler, spent one more night at the same La Quinta outside Pittsburgh Airport, then caught an early flight home Tuesday morning. Tired, sunburned in places we do not usually worry about, and already looking forward to next year. 🪐