Ron Dahlquist

No man should be without an island: Waianapanapa State Park near Hana, Maui.

C'mon, admit it. If you reflect on some of your most exhilarating moments in the wild, you'll almost certainly come up with at least one bracing skinny-dip or triumphant strip on a summit—moments that left you feeling more alive for facing nature the way you came into the world. The places where you bared it all are also precious, hidden gems you share carefully. Even if most of us never adopt the lifestyle of a true naturist (keep your Speedo on if you like), thinking like one can lead you to some of the few Edenic places left. In the pages that follow, our brazen correspondents put this theory to the test on Maui, in Baja California, and ten other places where you can let it all hang out.

Open Secrets, Part I
Full Monty Maui
By Tom Byrnes

SQUINTING IN THE low light of the jungle to recheck our coordinates, I was having doubts. The writing on the back of the envelope was clear, but the directions were sketchy. "Follow main highway past town. Look for black mailbox. Climb through the big gate across the street. Watch out for cows. Follow trail to the Portuguese oven. Go right. It's dead ahead." Assuming that the pile of concrete and ashes we had walked past a few minutes before was the oven, we were on the right track. But the dense brush made it hard to tell if we were lost or on the edge of the promised Eden: the mystical "Venus Pool."

Pushing ahead through the moist leaves and the sweet stench of rotting mangoes, I stumbled into a bright patch of afternoon sun and then out onto a cliff. Below me lay a dark, bottomless pool framed by soaring rock walls lined with vines. At the inland end of the pool lay a massive hardened lava flow that snaked out of the overgrowth and into the still water; at the other was a thin ribbon of black-sand beach that separated the pool from the ocean. The only sound: surf pounding the shore. Then a middle-aged woman popped out of one of the crevices in the lava and waved. Pink sunglasses aside, she was buck nekkid. Waving back, I turned to my wife and said, "Well, this must be the place."

While we hadn't come to Maui with the express aim of taking our clothes off, it didn't take long to realize that nudists seem to have cornered the market on what was left of the island's unspoiled places. Since hanging out au naturel remains just outlaw enough to require some privacy, these folks have established a small circuit of remote and sparsely attended spots like the Venus Pool—one of our last finds, on Maui's eastern shore. Directions were available only through the "coconut wireless"—a word-of-mouth network—but plugging into it was easy enough. All it took was a stop at Mana Natural Foods in Paia, the north shore's best health-food store, where a surfer was more than happy to connect us.

Until recently, I'd never been one to equate discretion with nude sunbathing, but nudity is technically illegal in Hawaii—another reason that nude spots are off Maui's beaten path. It's covered by a state statute outlawing "lewd behavior," designed to protect the sensibilities of native Hawaiians who find public nudity shameful. Such delicacy hasn't always been the case; the ancient Hawaiians were not nudists in the modern sense, but they were certainly not offended by the human body, and most wore only small garments made of kapa-bark cloth that they removed before swimming, surfing, or fishing. Then the first Calvinist missionaries from New England arrived in the early 1800s and brought with them a host of Puritanical attitudes. These days nudity might not be equated with damnation, but complaints to the police are treated as a priority, and arrests—with convictions entailing as much as 30 days of jail time and fines of up to $1,000—still occur. No worries, though. Starting with the quick tip from the surfer at Paia, we managed to turn a series of casual suggestions into an amazing weeklong tour of secret swimming holes, remote beaches, and hidden waterfalls, several on or near the private property of out-of-the-way resorts, where it's perfectly legal to skinny-dip.