The only public nude swimming area in Texas: Sign of a progressive
culture or Sodom and Gomorrah on the Texas Colorado River?

By JOHN WILLIAMS
Lower Colorado River Authority

AUSTIN — When a double-decker party barge overturned in May 2004 on Lake Travis near Austin, it was the splash heard round the world. Nobody drowned, and there were only two minor injuries as local authorities fished 60 passengers out of the water.

But radio newscaster Paul Harvey led with the story on his nationwide broadcast the next morning. The Associated Press and cable news channels cycled the story throughout the day, and it was fodder for late-night show monologues. Even the august British Broadcasting Corporation had a reporter call in for local color on the story, as did news organizations from Canada, Germany and Australia.

Why all that attention on a story that normally would have merited, at best, passing mention by area newspapers and TV stations? Perhaps because the incident occurred offshore of Hippie Hollow, which — as many of the stories pointed out — is the only public nude swimming area in Texas. (According to initial — but apparently incorrect — news accounts, the barge overturned after the passengers went to one side to look at the naked people.)

Progressive symbol or a sign of end of the world?
Depending on your point of view, Hippie Hollow symbolizes Austin's image as a laid-back, progressive city, or as Sodom and Gomorrah on the Colorado.

”Nobody's ever been there (Hippie Hollow), but everybody seems to know where it is,“ said Roy Turley, parks program manager for Travis County, which has operated a park at Hippie Hollow since 1985 and estimates an annual attendance of about 153,000.

Nor is its reputation strictly local, as Hippie Hollow regularly shows up on any list of favorite nude beaches around the world.

You call this a beach?
Nude it may be, but it's a stretch to call Hippie Hollow a beach. The 109-acre tract is a series of limestone ledges, surrounded by scrub cedar, that visitors must negotiate to get to the water. The surrounding cliffs shield the cove, providing near-total privacy to swim and sunbathe nude.

Its fans describe Hippie Hollow as breathtakingly beautiful. “It's one of the reasons I moved to Austin,” said Bob Morton, a Travis County resident and naturist who with his wife spent many weekends at the site as newlyweds in the 1970s planning their family — and planning to bring their children to Hippie Hollow.

'Oh my God, he's naked!'
According to Morton and other sources, nude swimming was an activity along the Colorado River upstream of Austin even before the Lower Colorado River Authority created Lake Travis in 1941 as a water-supply, flood-management and hydroelectric reservoir that is part of the Highland Lakes of Central Texas. The region was largely rural at the time, but the relative privacy at what would become Hippie Hollow made that site a favorite congregating place for practicing nudists, who were eventually joined by students from the nearby University of Texas at Austin who heard about the site by word of mouth.

Austin radio host John Aielli, a university student in the mid-1960s, remembers his first visit. After an arduous trek through the cedar, he and a fellow student entered a clearing where they encountered a man in his 40s who was sunning himself on a rock. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. Then the man stood up.

“My first thought was, 'Oh my God, he's naked!'” Aielli remembered. “I was scandalized.” The two students quickly found a place where they could swim, keeping their shorts on.

Aielli remembers the cove in those days as ”bucolic. It was a great place because only a few people went there, and they kept to themselves. You could meditate, if you wanted to.”

Woodstock impact
Then came August 1969 and a four-day rock concert at Woodstock, N.Y. that attracted almost half a million young people. Woodstock instantly symbolized the lifestyle and hedonism of what many people called ”hippies,“ as news coverage focused on such activities as male and female concertgoers playing, naked and unashamed, in a river on the concert grounds.

Inspired by Woodstock, more and more young people swarmed to the quiet cove on Lake Travis to “take off their clothes and do the hippie thing,” Aielli said. With attendance swelling to several hundred people on a summer weekend, the cove acquired a new name: “Hippie Hollow.”

And more than the name changed. The nudists and university students and professors were joined by motorcycle gangs and soldiers from nearby military bases. With no public restrooms, visitors relieved themselves in the bushes or in the lake. Beer cans, broken glass and trash began to clutter the cedar and limestone. An overflow of parked cars choked the road along the site. Visitors who didn't know or care about property lines trespassed on adjacent private property. Reports grew of public intoxication, pot smoking and sex.

”It got to be sleazy,“ Aielli said. “The place lost its appeal for me. The last few times I visited, I'd get in the water and swim as far away as possible.”

Controversy grows in the 1970s
Hippie Hollow's reputation continued to grow after the Travis County sheriff made it clear he was not going to arrest the skinny-dippers, even though state law prohibited public nudity.

“We had more important things to do,” explained Raymond Frank, who served as sheriff from 1973 to 1980. He said the process of arresting and booking each offender could take several hours, easily consuming his staff's time.

Rounding up naked swimmers was the least of Frank's worries. Besides the problems of trash and overflow parking, Frank had to deal with boaters who drove through Hippie Hollow's swimming area to gawk at the naked swimmers. Some boats dawdled, while other swooped by as they towed water-skiers, in some cases striking hapless swimmers.

The problems at Hippie Hollow continued to outrage Lake Travis homeowners and weekend visitors, and the backlash eventually found its way to Hippie Hollow's owner, which turned out to be — LCRA.

Strange bedfellows
The LCRA of the 1970s would have been the last place one would have suspected of owning Hippie Hollow, as it was the polar opposite of everything Hippie Hollow embodied. It was part of the Central Texas business and political establishment and for decades had been closely aligned with Lyndon Johnson during his career as a U.S. representative and senator. If archival photos are any indication, many of the LCRA officials were middle-age or older, kept their hair (if they had any) closely cropped and always wore a suit and tie, perhaps even in the shower.

LCRA management may have been surprised to learn it was in the skinny-dipping business. Though LCRA had acquired the land in 1935 to build Mansfield Dam and impound Lake Travis, by the early 1970s it had allowed many of its properties not directly related to its electric and water operations to fall into a state of benign neglect. But there was no doubt about who owned Hippie Hollow — or, as LCRA officials referred to it, “the McGregor tract” (named after the man who had originally owned the land) — as the complaints rolled in.

“This is regarding the spreading of nude people up and down Lake Travis,” wrote an irate state game warden in 1977, complaining about the cove being taken over by “naked fools” on weekends. He urged LCRA to erect signs reading “NO NUDITY ALLOWED” at the lake. “I do not feel that we should provide a place for the freaks, drug users, and nudists to violate the law,” the game warden wrote.

'A disgrace'
A visitor from San Antonio complained to LCRA in 1976 that seeing naked people on the Travis shoreline was “a disgrace.” “Why should they ruin our pleasure on the lake by not wearing any clothes!...Lake Travis has a bad repetation (sic) here in San Antonio because of the nude people — please do something about it.”

“I am very sorry to hear of your experience on Lake Travis, and we all regret that there are people who will act as some do,” LCRA General Manager Charles Herring wrote in reply. “As a family man myself, I get provoked by what some people will do. Surely we do not condone the conduct you described in your letter, but we are more or less helpless to stop it.”

Refuting an angry homeowner's characterization of Hippie Hollow visitors, Herring wrote in a 1975 letter: “It is true that some of this land is used by University of Texas students and others but I would hesitate to refer to any of them as 'the lowest order of animals in existence' because many of them are very fine young people.”

Powerlessness
There wasn't much LCRA could have done about Hippie Hollow. At the time, it lacked law-enforcement powers (it did not begin commissioning its own public-safety officers until the 1980s) and a budget to develop anything more than minimal park facilities. (LCRA launched a comprehensive parks program in the 1990s.)

Terry Colgan, who worked in LCRA's parks and lands operations during the time, often dealt with many of the problems from rowdy visitors and disgruntled neighbors.

“One time we installed portable toilets at the site to take care of the sanitation problem, but the toilets had barely been installed when someone set fire to them,” Colgan recalled. Trash barrels often were tossed — sometimes with the garbage still inside — into the lake.

Colgan remembered visiting an adjacent landowner who complained of having to watch from his patio as Hippie Hollow visitors performed sexual acts in full view on the adjacent Hippie Hollow property.

“I can't see a thing,” Colgan said as he looked out from the patio.

“Well, of course you can't,” the neighbor replied. “You need these binoculars.”

Neighbors sued in 1977 to force LCRA to close Hippie Hollow to the public. Judge Herman Jones quickly threw out the lawsuit, noting that state law prohibited LCRA from barring public access to its undeveloped land. But Jones admonished LCRA to find a solution to the problems, as “I think they're serious. I think they're grievous,” Jones told news reporters.

Travis County offers a solution
The solution appeared to lie in LCRA's relationship with Travis County, which had been leasing LCRA lands along Lake Travis to develop public parks, and with County Commissioner Bob Honts, who had won election the previous year in part on a promise to deal with the Hippie Hollow problems.

“The parks were a home run,” said Honts, referring to such popular parks at Windy Point and Mansfield Dam, which were generating revenues for the county while allowing visitors access to “some of the most beautiful property in Central Texas.” He figured a similar operation at Hippie Hollow could help pay for the facilities and staff to clean up and control the site.

By October 1983 the county and LCRA had approved an agreement for the county to lease the site from LCRA. In October 1985 the county's Hippie Hollow Park opened for business, after a two-year cleanup and site-development process. (Honts estimated that the county hauled away 150 dump-truck loads of broken glass.)

As a compromise with the skinny-dippers and local residents, law-enforcement officers agreed not to arrest people who swam or sunbathed nude as long as it was at Hippie Hollow. The effect, according to Morton, was that it “ghettoized” nude swimming at Hippie Hollow while removing it at other parks and locations along Lake Travis. But Honts said the purpose was to keep nudity out of the neighboring properties and other parks where it was less welcome.

To head off any legal challenges to nude swimming at Hippie Hollow, county officials placed a sign near the entrance warning visitors to expect nudity.

“It's not illegal to be nude, but it is illegal to create a disturbance, as you would be if you were walking naked in downtown Austin,” Honts explained. “But if you're on notice to expect nudity in a park, how can you claim that (nude visitors) are creating a disturbance?”

No minors
The only major challenge to the clothing-optional rule came from the county itself in 1995. Fearing they could be held liable for any sexual offenses involving minors at the park, county commissioners voted to restrict admission to adults 18 and older.

The vote upset Morton and his wife, who had been taking their three children to Hippie Hollow since they were infants. Now none of the three children would be able to enter the site until they were 18. Morton said he and other naturist families had been bringing their children to the site for years without incident, and the county was taking away the parents' rights on how to raise their children. “I found that offensive,” he said.

The Mortons sued the county and LCRA (as the landowner) to reverse the decision, but an appeals court ruled in favor of the county in 1999, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 2001.

'A comfortable, nonjudgmental environment'
The Hippie Hollow of today is far removed from the congestion, litter and uncontrolled behavior that plagued the site in the 1970s and early '80s. The park facility includes restrooms, water fountains and hiking trails. Sections of the park are closed off as habitat for two endangered bird species, the golden-cheeked warbler and the black-capped vireo.

County park officials say that as many as 800 to 1,000 visitors may cycle through Hippie Hollow Park on a spring or summer weekend day with good weather. The number may be even larger on a holiday weekend, with a line of people waiting to get in. Visitors may come from around the world, but about 75 percent are “regulars,” some who visit the park two or three times a week.

The park is “a lot of things to a lot of people,” said Roger Johnson, who has patrolled Hippie Hollow for 14 years as a Travis County park ranger.

The park visitors are an eclectic group of artists, business professionals, entertainers, dancers, students — even birdwatchers. They range, Johnson said, from the “hardcore nudists” to casual sunbathers to people who come to look at the naked swimmers.

While the county keeps no official statistics on visitors, Johnson estimated some unofficial demographics based on his own observations:

• Age: About three-quarters are age 30 to 60; 20 percent are in their 20s; 10 percent or less are older than 60.
• Ethnicity: About three-quarters are Anglo; about 20 to 25 percent are Hispanic; less than 4 percent are African-American. Visitors of Asian ethnicity are comparatively rare.
• Gender: Predominantly male on weekdays; about 55 to 60 percent male on weekends as more male/female couples visit the site.
• Nudity: About 90 to 95 percent of the visitors go nude, though there may be more clothed visitors during the twice-a-year “Splash Days” sponsored by the local gay and lesbian community.

The park continues a longtime tradition of unofficial “straight” and “gay” areas, although a lot of visitors intermingle between the areas. “It's a fairly comfortable, nonjudgmental environment,” Johnson said.

Turley said that before county staff can go to work at Hippie Hollow, “we have to ask, 'Do you have a problem working with people in the nude?'” Even with the park's clothing-optional rule, staff must remain fully clothed at all times.

Usually pretty quiet
County rangers regularly patrol the area to help maintain a safe atmosphere. Johnson said most calls for assistance are for First Aid, such as people who become exhausted or overheated, or the occasional drowning (though none has occurred since 2000, according to county and LCRA records).

Rangers respond to other complaints such as lewd behavior or sexual conduct, “visual harassment” from gawkers, or the occasional altercation or car burglary. Turley said the lewd-conduct complaints are comparable to (maybe a little more so) to what they encounter at nearby Pace Bend Park, which prohibits nudity.

Johnson said total incidents requiring ranger assistance tend to cluster around periods of peak attendance at the park but average about one a week. The rangers' presence holds such incidents in check, as do the park regulars, who are self-policing.

And once every year or so, a visitor's clothes may be stolen, along with whatever keys and wallets are in the clothing — leaving the victims with a double calamity, Johnson said. “All they have on is their birthday suit and a locked car in the parking lot that they can't get into,” he said.

Day-use only
The park operations have changed some things, perhaps for good. It's day use only, which means visitors can no longer camp at the site or go for a midnight swim. And closing the park to children interrupted the Mortons' plans to enjoy the park as a family.

But that changed Dec. 12, 2004, the day the youngest child turned 18. To mark his birthday, "he wanted to go back to Hippie Hollow," Morton said.

And so Morton, his wife and all three of their children visited Hippie Hollow that day. The lake temperature was 65 degrees, not very inviting for a nude swim. "We just stuck our feet in the water," Morton recalled. But clear, sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s allowed them to sunbathe comfortably.

"It was more of a gesture than anything else," Morton said. But for the first time in nearly a decade, the entire Morton family was back at Hippie Hollow.

John Williams is a senior writer and an unofficial historian of the Lower Colorado River Authority. Contact him at asklcra@lcra.org.