The Naked Hiker

For as long as I can remember I have liked it best when I was out of my clothes. I hiked naked, swam that way, loved the feel of the warm sun on my bare skin, and after we got married, Claire fully endorsed, and became a nudist just like me. We joined a club, traveled with nudist friends, and dedicated our lives to the notion of nude recreation.

At home we would be nude most of the time, and if we had friends over, most of the time we would always all be naked. In our hot tub there was hardly ever a bathing suit, and most people understood that. Even our non-nudist friends understood how we'd be dressed, or undressed..

When I was twenty-one I began hiking the major trails in California in a hat, heavy socks, boots, and dark glasses. Funny, but people I would meet on my hikes were amazingly, accepting my nudity like it was the uniform of the day. Some joined me, but many just hiked along, as if we were both dressed properly.

This is the story of one of those hikes. On June 12, 1995, I began my first solo nude hike of the John Muir Trail. I left Lone Pine at 10:00 am for the trailhead, then off to Yosemite for another 200 plus miles, and although I intended an earlier start, delays, acquiring permits, gathering a group of send-off hiking friends got me on the trail later than I had planned.

The trail is 211 miles long from Yosemite south to Mt. Whitney and runs through the John Muir and Ansel Adams Wildernesses, Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks. I had a sign pinned to my back pack that read The Naked Hiker, and left with twenty naked friends who intended to hike the first five miles with me, although five of them ended up walking twenty miles over Mt. Whitney.

I left out of Lone Pine after clearing the hike with the National Forest rangers, since there are no National Park regulations against nude hiking. After the first five miles, when they planned to stop: Mark, Bob, Claudia, Brent, and Kathy, continued on naked walking with me for another twenty miles. The first day I made 32 miles and camped next to a flowing stream above Forester Pass.

On our first day out we came across a group of hikers coming south. There were ten in their group and we came on them at about noon. They had stopped for lunch and we found them sitting under a large pine tree. They hailed to us and did not seem to be bothered by our being nude. We told them about my trip, the nudist group we were members of, and how far the other five people of our group were going.

They were curious, admitted they had skinny dipped on their way down from Yosemite, and were enthusiastic about my solo hike to end of the trail naked. Some in their group wanted to know about the Naturists (our group) and membership details. We said goodbye and continued to where my five friends were ending their trek.

I made camp later that day at Forester Pass and pitched my tent just above the stream. I was hoping to make it to Dollar Lake by the next night, but there was a lot of elevation rises between my first camp and where I wanted to get to for my next camp. The climbing looked to be difficult over the next few miles, about 5,000 feet of elevation increase per mile.

Five miles out I encountered a couple from New Zealand who were doing their second attempt. They had tried it a year before but had to end their hike because of illness. She was fine but he developed stomach cramps and they had to discontinue their adventure.

They were enthusiastic about my nude venture and even stopped and swam with me nude at a waterfall pool next to the trail. Their names were Sandy and Marcus and had done trails in the Appalachian range and in northern Minnesota. He was a high school principal and she was a lawyer.

That night I camped at the base of the waterfall, next to the pool where we had swam, and hoped to get an early start the next morning. I was able to get away after a quick breakfast of Malt-O Meal and powdered eggs. I had made five miles when I found bear tracks along the trail. There was an adult bear with smaller prints along side the larger ones, and I didn't want to cross the path of a female with cubs. I became extremely careful and moved quickly through the area. It is suggested that you sing or make noice so you don't come on them accidentally and surprise the mother with your presence. I went through the Simon and Garfunkel song book and sang my way through the forest, trying to avoid unexpectantly coming up on the bear with her cubs.

The bear didn't make her presence known and I made good time to my next destination by nightfall. I had stopped for lunch in a clearing along the trail and watched some Turkey vultures work over a carcass of a deer by the creek. They paid no attention to me and feasted on the fresh kill until I left after about thirty minutes.

I got to Muir Pass that afternoon rather late in the day, giving me almost no time to set up a camp before dark. I made a dry camp near the summit and was in my tent just after dark. An hour later I was in my sleeping bag when I heard voiced and was joined at the pass by three people from San Diego University.

I introduced myself the next morning. They seemed not at all bothered by my nudity, since they had seen my 'Naked Hiker' sign on my back pack and had heard I was on the trail. There is a nude beach in San Diego and were not at all scandalized by a nude hiker on the trail. There were two women and one man in the group, and they were all biology undergraduates studying to get their PhD's in marine science.

Since my degree is in ocean science we had a lot to talk about. They asked if I had ever been to Black's Beach near La Jolla and were not at all surprised to hear I had been many times. We parted after breakfast and exchanged cell numbers so we could contact each other later.

I started to have some back pain after a few hours of hiking and had to rest under some redwood trees near the trail. The pain was due to the straps on my backpack being too tight, and I spent some time adjusting them as I rested under those magnificent trees.

I was back on the trail after an hour of swearing and adjusting, then put in fifteen painful miles. A naked guy with a sore back is a heck of a note. I passed Mammoth Lakes before setting up camp that night and shared my piece of the forest with a lone hiker from Boston who had hiked the entire Pacific Trail. I felt like a piker compared to him. It was like a trip around the block compared to a walk to Denver.

His name was Kent. In fact, it still is. He liked that I was hiking naked, thought that took as much guts as his jaunt down the state. Personally, I think walking 1,000 miles is more than just walking without pants. Much more.

I was beginning to get low on supplies and was even considering edible plants. My problem is in identification. The book says it is either a mature Camus or an immature death Camus. One will feed you and the other will just kill you. Try it. See which it is. If you feel fine in the morning it was Camus. If you die, it was not. I will pass, thank you.

One day I came upon an incredible rock face along the trail and had to try my hand at climbing it. Problem is, only thing crazier than hiking to Yosemite naked is rock climbing without any clothing. I got most of the way up and was having a ball, and I didn't even fall, not once. It was a day of diversion, but I needed to get to a spot my wife could replenish my food supply.

That place was Devils Postpile National Monument. I found a place where there were bars on my satellite phone and got in touch with her. It would take her less time to drive there than it would take me to walk up the trail to the monument.

Going through Devils Postpile was interesting, because there were just enough tourists there to make my outfit a social media hit. I got more selfies than Taylor Swift on a Hollywood street. Once I got my food delivery, I had 45 miles more to go and my back was beginning to look like raw meat.

I was a few miles passed Devils Postpile when I saw someone on the trail ahead of me, maybe 300 yards from where I was, almost too far to see that it was a person, but what or whoever I saw seemed to be wearing the same thing as me, skin. I picked up my pace and in about an hour I caught up with a naked young lady named Sally. She was like me, hiking bare on the John Muir Trail.

When I caught up she turned around and said, "So, there really are two of us. I heard them say there was a guy doing the same as me." She belonged to the same organization as I do, The Naturist Society and had hiked nude in New Mexico and Minnesota, sailed naked in the Caribbean, and belonged to a nudist club I had been to.

We camped together that night and sat up late talking about things we had done naked. She said she once drove from Oregon to Southern California naked, dressing only to go into a rest stop to relieve herself and to buy food, sleeping in her car in a parking lot in Kings City, naked and not afraid because she slept with a three foot machete.

She said, like me, she collected experiences she had while nude and natural in the otherwise clothed world. She said she was, also like me, more comfortable while naked. She had been to all of the nude beaches I had, and longed to go to France to travel to the famous naked cities on the coast of the Mediterranean. She was the closest thing to a clone of me as anyone I had ever met.

We parted just south of the meadows and she met some of her friends who were car camping near Parson's Lodge. We exchanged email and cell phone numbers and promised to connect one another. I told her about Claire, my wife, and she said she thought she sounded like someone she would like. Sally and I hugged before she went to meet her friends. I waved and turned back up the trail.

I planned to finish at Toulumne Meadows. The problem there was I needed to be dressed before I ventured into a store or post office. People in the wilderness didn't seem to mind a fellow without clothes, but people in the post office were much more modest than folks out on the trail. I had clothes, so that wasn't a problem, but when to put them on was an important detail in planning. Guess wrong and you may be spending the night at the State's expense.

I had no desire to spend the night in the metal-bar hotel, so when I got to the camping and vehicle access area, I became just another well-dressed hiker on a stroll through a National Park.

I stopped at the ranger station and chatted with the rangers, and I heard talk about a guy who had hiked naked from San Diego to the end of the trail. The fact that they exaggerated my distance was only a little bit embarrassing. They only missed it by about 800 miles.

I had met people along the way up the state while naked who I liked and who didn't seem to mind a nude guy hiking along with them. I did things I had fun doing and had seen amazing sights along the way. I had rock climbed, cooked over an open fire, swam naked in beautiful streams, and met another bare hiker who liked being natural in Nature, just like me.

When I got to the visitor center at Toulumne Meadows Claire was there to pick me up. We loaded my pack in the back of the van, kissed, and smiled the kind of smile that only old married people can. It was not my last birthday-suit walk through the great outdoors, but then that is a naked story for another day.