I am on the wrong team

May 26

I woke up warm and toasty but with frost on the sleeping bag. I have always loved that, and it refreshed me considerably. Jake reminded me that the day's hike would take us past Deep Creek Hot Springs, a very popular clothing-optional natural hot spring. He expressed his natural, completely wholesome hope that beautiful women would be there in various states of undress. I rejoined that in my experience wilderness clothing-optional hot springs are cool, but usually their clientele tends toward male, old, and weird.

The trail took us down Holcombe creek and then across to the Deep Creek drainage. The trail here is very spectacular, set on a shelf usually high above the stream below. You hike in arid desert but hear, see and even smell the water below. I stopped upstream from the hot spring to get some drinking water (downstream has significant levels of old weird man pollution, also some elevated levels of fecal coliform), then walked into the hot spring as the afternoon was getting good and hot. 

Lots of people there, hikers as well as locals. Also a large group of Russian-speaking youngsters. I took a look around and did the natural thing: Got naked and jumped into a hot pool. I am of German extraction, and we Teutons do love to bathe naked. (Here's a weird fact: Freikoerperkultur, which is to say nudism, was one of the only facets of German counter- or sub-culture that Hitler couldn't quash. Yes, it would've been better if it had been a respect for human rights.) So I'm sitting there getting ood and hot, when I notice that

everyone

else 

is 

wearing

clothes. 

What the hell? What happened to American Freedom and hippies and all of that? Where's Dennis Hopper to back me up on this? Dead? Really? Oh yeah that's right. There was this one guy who was also naked -- middle-aged, wearing only a very sensible broad-brimmed sunhat and a daypack. If he was at Burning Man, he'd've been a shirt-cocker. He was lecturing some poor young female through-hiker on how her pack weighed too much, although he himself was clearly not hiking any further than his car. When he finally left her, he promised he would "be back to check up on you later tonight." This was not a guy on whose team I wanted to be. I slinked back to my backpack and put on my shorts.

Still and all, a dip in a hot spring and a swim in a cold pool are very refreshing. I fairly glided the remaining miles for that day and slept in a pocket site way up on the side of the canyon wall.