A couple of years ago I moved from Southern California to back to Las Vegas, the city of my youth. With the move, I went from a fairly robust naturist scene—clubs, beaches, community—to a city with no formal outlet for naturism. No clubs, no beaches. Just desert.
I knew about the Vegas Bares, a nonlanded group I’d heard of vaguely through word of mouth and their website. They seemed mostly dormant after Covid, their events and parties having evaporated along with everyone else’s, but I signed up as a member anyway—to support them, to see if I could make a connection. It did form one connection, by text, with a phone number entered into my contacts simply as “John.”
From time to time I have heard from John—usually in the friendlier weather months which are few and fleeting in Las Vegas. The texts usually serve as short-notice notifications of planned hikes or paddleboarding along the lower Colorado river or Lake Mead. Often, I was interested in joining, intellectually at least. My primary naturist recreation since moving here has largely been solo nude hiking in the deserts around me—but I have generally kept those hikes on the milder side because I am usually alone and don’t want to get stuck anywhere. The desert is deadly, you are taught that when you grow up here, as I did.
So for many of John’s invitations, I either couldn’t make it work or shied away from committing to something where I’d be out-leagued or feel out of place. I’d been mourning the naturist community I left in Southern California for two years, and my practice here had become a solitary thing—protected from falling out of practice entirely, but longing for some community, and some culture.
And then a text from John came with an invitation that I couldn’t reasonably turn down. A “full moon” hike to the Arizona Hot Springs. Saturday night. The trailhead, by car, is not twenty minutes from my house. I really had no excuses.
Well, not none. The desert is brutal, and this is a serious trail for a beginning-to-moderate hiker like I am. It closes from May to September because of extreme heat. Every year people require emergency rescue out there, and it’s not unheard of for people to perish, a fact hikers are reminded of by a memorial at the trailhead for a woman who recently died from exposure. There was also a story in the news last year about a field trip of kids that all had to be rescued from the trail because they hadn’t brought enough water and couldn’t make it back. It’s recommended each person carries at least three liters down to the Springs. These kids had brought a 12 oz bottle each.
I also, being honest with myself, had no idea what to expect from this group. What if it’s just one other guy and we’re halfway down into the canyon before I lose cell signal and he starts talking about his collection of animal teeth? Would I turn back? The nerves started to set in and, like I had many times before, I considered backing out.
I reminded myself that I'd been texting with John for a couple of years—which would be an extraordinary commitment if he was just a creep who wanted to talk about animal teeth. I knew they organized hikes on this trail a few times before, so presumably they were somewhat legitimate, or at least knew it better than I did. The internet told me we were in for a bright full moon, lows around 70, low wind—favorable conditions, notwithstanding the inclines and rock scrambling I'd read about. I decided to face my nerves and go.
I arrive at the trailhead right at 4:30pm. Two men are gearing up by their cars. Greg is a small, extremely tan guy with salt-and-pepper hair and the voice and Appalachian accent of Billy Bob Thornton. He was just out on this trail yesterday, he tells me—it was hotter then, so that’s good for us. Keith has a serious hiking pack, walking sticks, boots he’s still lacing up. I learn he does this hike weekly, sometimes daily, and takes great care to help maintain the trail and springs during the open season. I look down at my string backpack and low-top trail shoes and wonder briefly if I’m in over my head.
Soon John and Mark pull up in a white Tesla. Mark is shorter, a bit barrel-shaped and bald on top with large dark sunglasses—he looks enough like Arizona Senator Mark Kelly that when I hear his first name, I do a double take, but he takes off his sunglasses and I see he has very different eyes. John is thin, athletic, younger than I pictured, maybe early 50s, if I had to guess. Within a few minutes it’s clear that all four of them are regulars on this trail, and that I’ve accidentally assembled the best possible guides for an after-dark excursion through the killer desert.
The sun is still high as we head down the 2.5-mile trail. We don’t get far past the trailhead before we stop and disrobe. Keith suggests we carry wraps just in case, but says if we encounter someone, don’t rush to cover up—just act normal and friendly. The whole way in, the guys track who they see hiking out against how many cars they counted in the lot at the trailhead, apparently noting how many people are still somewhere down the trail. I realize later this isn’t curiosity—it’s an informal safety system. They’re keeping an eye out.
It’s over a mile before we have our first encounter. This trail is popular with day-hikers who come down on a Saturday to hang in the hot springs, jump in the Colorado, and hike back out in the afternoon. The whole way in, the guys are amazed we haven’t seen more people.
The first group we come across includes some young adults and an older woman who looks like the afternoon got longer than she planned. The young adults look a little weirded out to find five naked men in the desert, but the older woman doesn’t bat an eyelash. “Do you know if it’s this hot all the way up?” “It is,” Keith says, “but make sure you go straight at the fork—don’t go left or you’re in for a much more intense climb out. Do you have enough water?” They say they do, thank us and head up.
A few minutes later we pass a couple young guys hiking out who look a little faded—not an unexpected sight on this hike out to the lakeside. A lot of people come to party. Mark asks them if they have enough water. “Yeah we’re good,” they reply. “Thanks, man.” I don’t know if they even noticed we were naked.
As we walk, John fills me in on the Vegas Bares. They’ve been around in various forms for more than twenty years, throwing parties and organizing events under different leaders at different time. Their most recent era has seen a lot of change. Covid took their event spaces and their membership bled out slowly after that. What was left constricted, and the core group found their place and focus around the areas’ hot springs. Not long ago, they lost their charter with the American Association for Nude Recreation because they couldn’t meet the minimum membership requirement of twenty.
The trail descends into a canyon, and I can tell by the mountains ahead that we’re nearing the Colorado—but that could still mean more than a mile from our destination. Some light cloud cover is coming in. The sun is still pretty high but it’s cooling off.
As we wind through the canyon I start seeing messages chalked on the stone walls and on large rocks:
NO GLASS.
FAMILY-FRIENDLY NUDITY IS A TRADITION AT ARIZONA HOT SPRINGS.
YOU MAY ENCOUNTER NUDITY BEYOND THIS POINT.
I soon find out these were written by Keith.
As we hike, he tells me about a confrontation at the springs earlier that week. A female river guide had brought clients up to the pools and insisted everyone should cover up around them. One of the nude moms camping there pushed back immediately. “These springs have always been clothing optional,” Keith recalls her saying. “If your clients want everybody dressed, that’s your problem.”
What really stayed with him, though, was one of the kids asking: “Don’t they like my birthday suit?” I learn Keith’s a dad and we bond over that.
Before long we hit a corner where everyone stops to pee. “After this curve the water all feeds into the pools,” someone says, “so this is your last chance without hiking back up or down a little further.” We shake it out and move on, and within a couple of minutes we’re at the mouth of the first pool. Before us is a spring in the canyon wall providing a constant run of fresh water. Keith points out that you can refill your bottles from this if you need to, though the water runs at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
John gives me the rundown. There are three main pools formed from sandbags and the natural canyon walls. The top pool, fed directly from the source, runs around 120 degrees—an uncomfortable temperature to even stand still in for long let alone soak in. You trudge through fast and climb out the other side. Pivot around a canyon corner and you reach the second pool, which usually sits around 105. You can sit in this one for a few minutes but it’s not advised that you push it for long. There’s a story about a guy just last week who wouldn’t get out despite warnings and sure enough, he passed out for ninety minutes before finally coming to, narrowly avoiding an emergency extraction.
The third pool—the Cinderella pool, they call it—runs at a perfect 99 degrees and spills over a 20-foot warm waterfall into the canyon below. The waterfall is straddled by a metal stairway you can take to hike down to the Colorado River, just a few miles downstream from the Hoover Dam.
Some people are in the pools in bathing suits when we arrive. We’re the only nude group. Nobody seems particularly bothered, but one group packs it in quickly and heads down the stairway back to their camp on the cove. We settle into the Cinderella pool, feeling a little like we might have chased them off, but not feeling too too bad about it. I find a wedge of the pool where I can stretch out a little and find I can recline perfectly on a long flat rock so that I’m nicely submerged and also comfortably above full submersion.
The ancient water is just over body temperature and holds me comfortably supine. I look up at the canyon walls above me, stretching maybe eighty or ninety feet before they open to a yellowing sky—the same view people have soaked under here for generations. It’s quiet, and I can hear bats hunting in the evening light. I’m starting to see the appeal of this place.
After an hour or so a few of us decide to take the metal stairway down from the Cinderella pool and follow the canyon to the river. The Colorado here runs cold and clear through Black Canyon, moving semi-naturally—one of the few stretches in this whole system that still does. The dam is a few miles upstream. On the far bank the cliffs rise sheer and dark, volcanic. The canyon walls absorb heat all day and hold it into the evening.
This is land that was once inhabited by Southern Paiute and Hualapai, who lived along this river and throughout this desert for centuries before anyone built anything here. The springs themselves are older still: water working its way down through fault lines in the earth, picking up geothermal heat for thousands of years before finding its way back to the surface in this slot canyon at a reliable 120F. The infrastructure around it—the sandbags, the trail, the chalk on the walls—is seasonal. The spring is not.
There are kayakers pulled up on a gravel bar downstream, a couple of campers with a game of cards going. They wave. Later some of them will make their way up to the pools. It’s that kind of place. It has always drawn people in.
We get back up to the pools and settle in as the sun starts to drop. The conversation loosens the way it does when people are warm and unhurried.
I start to get to know these guys a little. Greg, it turns out, is only here because his wife is out of town. She’s joined him on nude beaches over the years—they’ve been married thirty-five years—but she draws the line at the hot springs, for reasons that seem to genuinely baffle everyone in the pool. Keith has four adult kids and his dad energy extends naturally to these springs. Mark has been a naturist since he was eighteen and makes no secret of the fact that he considers this the pinnacle of the practice. John is mild-mannered and observant, with a boylike humor that surfaces at surprising times.
I also learn about others. There’s a story about a regular named Maintenance Mike, who spent years keeping the pools until the park service banned him—for reasons nobody can quite articulate to my satisfaction, though I come to understand it as the natural politics of any shared space, even an ancient and public one out in the middle of the desert. Maintenance Mike’s absence is still felt, apparently. The pools have more gravel in them than they used to, I’m told.
As the sun drops, a guy named Dan climbs up from the river side. He’s introduced to me as a serious hot springer—someone who has camped at springs all over the world—and his arrival shifts the conversation. They trade destinations the way other people trade restaurants: Deep Creek up in the San Bernardinos, Gold Strike just up the road, a spring in Niger, another in New Zealand, Wyoming. Then the war stories start. Pseudomonas rashes, cercarial dermatitis from parasitic larvae, a cautionary tale involving Naegleria fowleri—the brain-eating amoeba whose name I recognize from the warning signs I’d seen posted in this very canyon on the way in. I sit and listen, a little on the outside of it, trying to absorb the geography and the lore of a subculture I didn’t know had this much territory.
I’m the new guy, so they are sure to remind me that hot water dehydrates you, an unsubtle hint that I should keep drinking. I step out of the pool and squint to find my hike bag in the dark. I take a long refreshing drink. I look back and what I see is group of people in a hot tub in the moonlight, talking and sharing stories, laughter occasionally reverberating up off the canyon walls. As an active nudist I’ve been in my fair share of hot tubs, and this is not an unfamiliar scene.
It’s in this moment, in the dark, that it hits me. I’ve spent two years hiking alone in this desert, wondering where the naturists were. They were here.
On the way back up we don headlamps and climb out of the canyon single file. After a mile or more we’re in open desert again. The moon is full and bright enough that we kill the lamps and walk the rest of the way in moonlight. It’s beautiful, but a significant incline up from the river banks, and my legs are burning more with each step.
Over a hour of walking and it’s nearly midnight by the time we reach the highway. I’m running on fumes, and I assume it will take me at least a day or three to bounce back from the both the hike and the late night. But as we’re packing up to say our goodbyes, these guys—all of them at least a decade older than me—are already talking about coming back tomorrow.
As I mentioned, the Vegas Bares lost their AANR charter not long ago. The Bares, at this point, are not twenty people. But the ones who are left have been hiking into this canyon together for years, maintaining these pools, looking out for strangers on the trail. The parties and events that used to define the group never came back after Covid, and what remained evolved. But they didn’t stop being naturists. If anything they became more committed to it than anyone I’d encountered in years. Think about it, when was the last time you hiked over an hour through scorching, craggy rocks and desert to be nude with friends?
I keep thinking about the chalk-written nudity rules on the canyon walls. Every season, sometimes week by week, someone comes back down here and writes the rules again. They shift the sandbags and remove gravel from the pools. These pools change shape. There are no resort pools here, no golf cart tours, no welcome packets. There’s no permanent record, no charter, no minimum membership. You get here by hiking two and a half miles through terrain that can kill you. The people here have earned this. They show up, they maintain it, they look after each other and the strangers they pass on the way out. Keith picks up garbage and chalks notices on canyon walls. The group tracks cars so everyone gets home. This is their practice.
Summer nudist events around the country are just getting started, but here the season is just about to end. Every year, either on May 15th or earlier if the temperature forecast at a nearby weather station hits a threshold for five consecutive days, NPS closes the trail. Keith has been watching the forecast. It could be this week.
You hike every day you can, because you don’t know which day is the last one for a while.
Not a week after my trip, the trail closed until fall arrives. I’m sad I’ll have to wait that long, but after a couple years of feeling alone out in this desert, I’ve finally found what I have been looking for, and you bet I’ll be back. 🪐