So if you’re aware of the present moment, I work at a naturist park. Things have been going well, and we’ll see when we get to those chapters I talk about the experiences. But here is where I experienced my first real dip in the toe in it, as Tim and I went to try to get a spring for Clothesfree.com
It was a disaster, but it also was a fun experience.
Tim had told me about this hot spring located just south of Vegas. There is this website where they cover events for naturists called Clothes Free dot com. It has some unique events for nudist culture, and is a decent site. Tim made the suggestion we do the hot spring and send the footage. It’s money on the road for me, and I’d get an adventure.
As it turns out, one of those things came true.
So the spring is just inside the Nevada/Arizona border, about thirty miles or so from Vegas. right near the Hoover dam. I have to say, the water was a lot less than I expected, but the structure around the dam is legit impressive. You can really only see it heading north into Nevada, but it’s worth parking your car to see. It’s a sight to behold. The other thing about that area that’s interesting to behold is the amount of solar panels on the ground between destinations. Imagine crops of these things right along the highway. Going on the highway, you find yourself surrounded by them in spots.
That said, just south of the dam, we had arrived.
Now the spring itself was down a path. Tim’s GPS had given us two paths to get to the spring. The first path was kind of long, and seemed to go out of the way towards the spring. According to the second route, it would get a little bit narrow in spaces, but it’s a more direct path, and one that would end up with pay dirt for the springs.
That’s the route we chose to explore. It might be a bit more bumpy, but we’d get there faster and chill.
Now, Tim was trying to be a good sport about this, but the initial path from the parking lot to the park on the street is long. It’s a good mile before the trails are visible and start to diverge. He was tired, and thought for a moment we should stop and turn around. At that moment, it was only a little bit into the trip. I encoruaged him to move on. After all, we had driven this way. The last thing we wanted to be rewarded with was a pile of dirt. So we pressed on. Sure enough, Tim found his second wind and was committed to this. We started filming for clothes free.
So here’s the thing about being naked, I don’t have a problem with it. I was introduced to the idea of nudism through an ex friend’s ex girlfriend. She was comfortable in the nude and didn’t mind. People think wearing no clothes is exhibitionism, and that’s actually the furthest thing from the truth. It’s more a liberation, because a funny thing happens after the clothes are off for a few minutes. You tend to forget everyone around you is naked. That isn’t to say your awareness is completely gone with the fact, but if everyone is in that mode, it’s easy to not worry about it. That was the feeling as I was put on camera. I’ll have to write a separate piece on nudism and naturism, and I will next week as this was far and away my last experience. What I will say for those who’ve never done it, is that it’s nothing like you imagine it to be. This much like the rest of the trip deviates from what’s advertised.
I digress. Let’s continue the story.
We followed the path, and in places it got narrow, rocky, but it was fun. There was something neat about going off the beaten path and knowing you were getting closer to the objective in front of you. The springs were only a couple of miles away.
And then, we had to stop. Rather, we had a sudden drop. The path we led took us straight to a fifteen foot drop. Nothing but hard ground was below us, and there was no way down from there. I’m a brave fellow, but even I balked at that kind of leap of faith. There was nowhere else to go.
I was pretty chill about it. Doing this kind of journey, I’m used to deviations, roadblocks and in general, able to pivet quickly. Tim was upset. This trip wasn’t easy for him, and the idea of coming all this way for nothing got to him. This was made worse coming back, as even with the GPS, the trail wasn’t quite crystal clear in spots. So to find our exact footing, I scaled a giant hill//mini mountain to look down and calibrate where we were.
Along the way, time fell and scraped his knee. Upset became pure ferocity. Tim was not a happy dude after this trip, and more so because the long walk back got more miserable.
What killed us both a bit was that there wasn’t anything wrong with where we went. By and large, we followed the GPS exactly, and when we finally made it back to the car, we discovered others that had found the same long drop we did.
We also met others that had chosen the other path. There was a spring there. That made things kind of bittersweet. So there was a spring at the end of the road, but we weren’t going to get there. Instead, we went away, back into town, bought a dinner on a boat in the tourist area around the dam, and headed back to Vegas, defeated and denied a spring in our future.
I call schenanigans on this one. I didn’t get to see the spring and I didn’t get to swim in the nude in said spring. Nor did I make content. That said, I do have an adventure with my friend, and in spite of the journey and where it led us, I think we became better friends for it. Fortune didn’t smile our way, but Adventure gave us something unforgettable.
Besides, we’d have other chances.