To begin with, I am so very lucky. And no matter how much bare female skin I see around me I just can't help looking and looking. The same is true of all the guys here, even Dexter and Francesco, who are gay. So lucky to be surrounded by so much beauty.

And it doesn't get boring, even after three semesters. Naked girl after naked girl, each body is a feast in itself, a story in itself, that reveals more and more the more you look. How do I mean this? In high school you could tell a girl's personality as much by her clothes, it seemed, as by her face. There was this one girl, Merrie, who was a Phish-head, she always wore flowing hippie dresses and knit vests. Jerry was the school fashion plate, every fingernail perfectly done, each lace on her brand-new sneakers set just so. Trish was the utter nerd, big glasses, unstyled hair, boy's sports shirt buttoned up to the top. Traci was in a constant storm, always breaking up with someone and telling the world about it -- and she dressed to be noticed, backless shirts, super-low-rise jeans where you could see her thong sticking out the back.

With the women at BSC Alturas, not allowed to wear clothes, I find their naked bodies -- their breasts are, well, as expressive as their face, they have a personality of their own, which fits their real personality like a second pair of eyes. Stacey Peaches, for example, who has "itty bitty titties", the little nipples poke out cock-eyed, just like she is, looking kooky. Wendy Macalester (or "Mac", as everyone's starting to call her), her breasts are tan and hard like the rest of her, the nipples looking straight ahead, focused on where they're going. Shelly, the really shy girl, hers are always half-retracted (except when it's cold), as if wanting to hide. Sandy, the older woman, around 35 or so, she's been a nudist for years, I hear. Her breasts, kind of big, they sag a little, but the nipples, stretched looking and a little droopy, kind of wink at you, as if they've been through a lot but it's been a real good ride. Keisha, who is black (or dark brown really), well her nipples really are jet black and always hard, jutting out into the world, pioneering like she always seems to be doing, plunging into new things. And then Sarah's, the biggest breasts on campus, balloons bouncing along as big as life itself, the huge brown nipples dancing like at a party, happy and active just like Sarah is.

I could go on and on about each girl's breasts, and also each girl's midriff, each girl's thighs, etc. There are thirty girls here, and thirty guys, up in this mountain outpost, the Alturas campus of Blanke Schande College. If "the Rules" were suddenly changed and the girls decided to go around with faces hidden in ski caps, we guys could still recognize them by their breasts, and talk to them that way too, which is how most of them think we talk to them anyway.

This body-personality business is especially intense when it's cold out. We were sitting around a few days ago outside, me and Hank and Ahmad and Mac, and she was standing up next to me, talking about her favorite thing, rock climbing, and I looked over and right next to me were her breasts, flushed and red with the cold, which made them tighter, her whole torso seeming even harder than usual, the nipples poking out, hard as pebbles and red-brown, and as I looked more I suddenly realized she was covered with little goose-bumps all over. And she was oblivious to the cold as she was answering a question about, well I forget.

"Um, Corey?" she said, trying to get my attention back to her words. She was nice about it, though. The girls understand our obsession with their bodies, we're just guys after all, and treat it with good-natured tolerance.

'How do they stand it?' is another thing we think about, along with everyone at the main campus, especially the girls there, most of whom have never gotten comfortable with walking around naked in the warm weather and think of Alturas women as totally nuts. Most of the school year, snow is in evidence around the campus here, and there are blizzards and some truly Arctic nights, yet the girls have to be naked at all times, and though they keep the heat in their dorm cranked to about 80 degrees (or so it seems to us clothed guys, we start sweating as soon as we walk in), they don't seem to be in a hurry going from building to building outside. I remember last year when I visited here for the first time, as we drove onto campus there were a couple of girls chasing each other in the snow, their bare toes kicking up bits of snow behind them as they ran, firing snowballs at each other. It seemed ostentatious at the time, deliberately trying to be shocking, but of course they weren't doing it just for me, and I came to see that it was just a fun thing to do and perfectly ordinary around the Alturas campus.

Certainly the girls are conditioned. Lisa has told me about it. The girls all take a course on Body Awareness, taught by a Dr. Tereshkova, a Russian lady with a thick accent. I might take it next semester; for the guys it's available as an elective. She talks about feral children surviving naked in the snow, the physiology of frostbite, how to watch for the signs of hypothermia. Then there's the two exercise classes the girls have to take each day that keep the metabolism up.

And the "five minute chill", which you see the new girls doing starting in October when it gets cold, with a helper who has a stopwatch. The deal is, the new girl walks outside until she starts shivering. Then waits five minutes more by the stopwatch, standing as still as she can, before going in to where a tub of hot water is waiting. Gradually, like with exercise, her body builds up strength and resistance and she can stay in the cold longer and longer, until finally she can stay out quite a long time.

Actually it's not always cold here. The typical winter day in Alturas is sunny and beautiful, and though technically the temperature is a little below freezing, in the sun it's pretty warm, enough to start melting the snow. It's usual to see a bunch of girls sitting right in the it, or lounging around on it, enjoying the warm sun while they're talking about the usual girl things, idly playing with the snow, lifting it up with their toes, maybe even sprinkling some bits of it on their breasts or thighs where it melts and little rivers of water run down . . . I'm getting carried away again. But the point is, whoever thought that naked girls could be so unfazed and unafraid of being in snow, let alone learn to enjoy it?

Getting back to bodies, the girls' butts have personality too, we guys having a great time watching the girls after they pass. I like the little Y-shaped dimples over their tailbones, I remember seeing just the hint of them on Traci and other girls who wore low-rise jeans, well here at Alturas I get to see the whole thing. My favorite dimple is Lisa's, my girlfriend, thin and calm like she herself is, over those two delectable trim cheeks. And her beautiful puckered anus in between. I never thought of a butthole as "beautiful" before, but Lisa's is, so little and tight and perfectly drawn, the wrinkles like the stippling of a thin-lined pencil. When we were getting closer and I was always asking her to "present", I just couldn't stop looking at it.

Let me get this out of the way: we guys have decided, after close observation: Lisa's butt cheeks are shaped like cherries. Sandy's are like pears. Keisha's are like pears, except they're upside down, a nice high black butt. Mac's are like apples (how fitting). Sandy's are oranges, and Shelly's are like kiwis, though embarrassed because they've been denuded of their furry covering. We've discussed it endlessly and the above consensus is clear. Sometimes when we would see a few of the girls walking together, four or six or eight butt cheeks in a row, one of us would mutters, "I feel like I'm in the supermarket." Or: "Produce aisle!" That joke got old after a while, but we all still think it whenever the fruit goes sauntering past.

Getting back to the dimple, Lisa has a very intelligent-looking "Y". Lisa is so beautiful all over, her knock-out face, those happy and intelligent blue eyes, her sober yet optimistic outlook on life. I'll never forget our first kiss. We were walking down the path behind the dining hall, it was a bright sunny afternoon, beautiful dark blue sky up in these mountains. There was slushy snow that was quickly melting into puddles. There wasn't a sound except some birds and us slogging along the path, me with loud slops from my boots, next to the delicate splishing of her bare feet.

We had been walking together a lot and, as I know now, she had been feeling close to me just as I was feeling close to her. It was just "a matter of time", and our friends sensed it too. Still I was stalling. I said, looking down at her freezing feet, "I still can't see how you can do that".

"You get used to it," she said. She wiggled her toes for me. "I'm not even numb now, though I used to be." We walked a bit and she stomped onto slush, which splatted to both sides, a little coming up onto her toes. "I like this slush the best. It looks like sugar frosting."

We stopped. Why didn't I just kiss her? Looking back, it seemed so silly for me to do, but I see why I did it. As she gaped in surprise, I stepped out of my boots, rolled off my thick hiking socks, and planted my feet square in the slushy puddle right next to hers.

We watched our feet. It was cold, cold, cold unlike anything I'd ever known. And then a tingling, and then my feet felt stiff and numb. I looked up at her, past her stiff nipples and flushed, reddened, hard body, up to those pretty eyes. We knew it was time, and drew together in a kiss. I dropped my boots and socks and wrapped my arms around her, one around her shoulders, the other gently draped over her left butt cheek, and then we really went at it, doing the tongue thing, she grinding her breasts against my jacket as she held my head with one hand and the back of my jacket with the other.

We separated and put our heads on each other's shoulders and giggled, with relief and with the satisfaction that we had both guessed right about the other. Hard to think of something to talk about at such a time, so maybe it was lucky that something occurred to me, namely my feet. I discovered I couldn't move my toes, and it was starting to feel painful.

"My feet hurt," I said. She looked down with concern. "I still don't know how you do it." "You haven't been conditioned," she said. "You should get inside."

With effort I pulled one foot up out of the puddle and I started to put my socks on but she stopped me. "Wet socks is worse than nothing," she said. "Let's just go back, like this." So we headed back to her dorm, barefoot, though I kept on stumbling, not being able to flex my feet with the rocks and unlevel path, so she helped me along.

[to be continued]