It’s mail day at Wonderhussy’s house in Tecopa, near Death Valley. She greets me with her arms full of packages. An emergency hand-crank radio. A handmade talisman stick. A guide to Nevada’s brothels, which she already owns. All from fans. “A thousand grandpas send me $20 here and there for gas,” she tells me. Sometimes more after Social Security checks. Once, an older guy—most of her fans are older guys—sent her $85,000, more than enough to buy a 4Runner. If she was going to be a real desert explorer, he told her, she needed an upgrade from her pickup truck.
Wonderhussy, whose real name is Sarah Jane Woodall, is a 47-year-old nude model turned adventure YouTuber with 266,000 subscribers. The Reno Gazette-Journal crowned her “one of the more prominent backcountry explorers in Nevada.” She shoots videos across the West, from abandoned mines, ice caves, and hidden hot springs, with a quirky, no-holds-barred narrative style appealing to conservative truckers and free-spirited nudists alike.
On YouTube, content is organized by genre: Wonderhussy Adventure is videos of her travels, and Wonderhussy Report is mock newscasts digging into mysteries of the desert. In person, Wonderhussy’s her own planet, attracting a fascinating motley crew into her orbit—fetishists and showgirls and small-claim miners. She also stirs unwelcome attention: fans who show up at her house uninvited asking for a picture and, more recently, a stalker who drove from Florida just to see her. Eventually, she persuaded him to leave, but he later sent a barrage of explicit emails, and she was so spooked that for a couple of weeks she carried a handgun in her bathrobe pocket.
Her most popular videos (each runs about 25 minutes) are ones where she’s wearing little clothing: hanging out at a naked campsite in Quartzsite, Arizona; soaking in hot springs in the buff; shaving her armpits. But viewers are also taken with her personality. She’s a lady who knows a lot about mines and trucks, and she presents as ideologically ambiguous, a touch right (gun owner) and a touch left (thick armpit hair, usually). Viewers fill in the outline she’s given them. They think of her as a friend.
Wonderhussy’s work, like that of all “content creators,” responds to her subscribers, and in doing so, it dwells in a space of tension: Between what the viewers want—a full face of makeup as she romps in the backcountry—and who she really is. Between making the natural world more accessible and exposing it to degradation. She clearly loves the places she visits, and her viewers, in turn, love her. But how much love is too much?
Wonderhussy saved our outing, to a prospector’s cabin in the mountains outside Pahrump, Nevada, for a day like this one, when she needs material. Lately, it feels like she’s scraping the bottom of the barrel for content. “I wake up in the morning feeling like I’m on a treadmill set to the max speed and I’m just trying to keep up, because if I don’t, I’ll fly off and smash my head on the wall,” she tells me.
Her 4Runner climbs a gentle incline to the Nevada border, and we turn toward the snowcapped Spring Mountains. Wonderhussy parks to shoot B-roll and an intro to the video. “Hello,” she tells her Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, clutching a selfie stick, tilting her sunglasses down, and slipping into her familiar, vaguely country accent. “Wonderhussy here, rolling along a bumpy dirt road in the middle of nowhere.” She zooms in on the mountains before setting the camera on a road-level tripod; footage of wheels rolling on dirt gives her videos texture. People also like aerial POV; she sometimes operates a drone while driving on remote dirt roads. Wonderhussy may work for herself, but her audience is the boss.
The cabin turns out to be a dud. A No Trespassing sign forces us to turn around. It’s time for plan B. We pull up to a red barn at Nature Health Farms, a petting zoo–hemp farm–wedding chapel–antique store. Alex, the owner (who moonlights as a Las Vegas VIP concierge), recently asked Wonderhussy to make a video there. He takes us around the back. Animals swarm: goats and chickens and regal turkeys, a donkey, alpacas, two peacocks strutting in the background and an ostrich nipping from behind a fence. Alex gives Wonderhussy a bucket of alfalfa, and goats mob her. She starts recording.
“Everybody wants a piece of the action,” she says. She turns her camera. “This is Alex. He’s the brains behind this operation.” He smiles.
The conversation falls into familiar banter, even though they’ve just met. “Alex, you were saying the most valuable part of the alpaca is the what?” she asks.
“The fertilizer,” he replies.
“It’s the best fertilizer in the world?” she asks. “Really?”
He nods. “You can buy it in a 750-milliliter bottle.”
“You can buy a bottle of alpaca poop?” Wonderhussy laughs, incredulous.
“What you do is you make a tea out of it,” he tells her, as though stating the obvious.
“When I get home, I want to pour that on what?” she asks. “What if I want my eyelashes to grow? Does it work for that?”
“Then,” Alex says, “you need CBD.”
Alex is flighty, and Wonderhussy deftly keeps up with his tirades against neighbors and his snake oil salesman pitches for his homegrown products. I’m exhausted after an hour. But there’s no time to rest: Alex suggests a ride through town in his Humvee—an offer that, in principle, Wonderhussy can’t refuse. We scramble into the back. “That’s what happens when you roll with the Huss,” Wonderhussy tells the camera. Alex revs the engine.
We pull onto the highway, and the mountains shine under golden-
hour light. “Alex just said we’re almost there, and we have no idea where ‘there’ is,” Wonderhussy narrates. “Hopefully there isn’t a big pit in the ground and he’s gonna murder both of us and we’ll never be seen again.”
Our destination is, in fact, a pit: Alex brings us to a gravel operation. As we descend, mounds of dirt rise before us. Wonderhussy’s face lights up; she’s in her element, in a weird, new place with plenty of things to learn. She steps out of the Humvee and volleys questions at the pit owners: How long has the family been digging the pit in that very spot? Are they busy every time it rains? What kind of rocks do they use?
“Boy, you just never know where the day is going to take you,” she says, beaming. “I am legitimately excited to go to the bottom of a gravel pit. I’m not sure what that says about me.”
Occasionally, Wonderhussy receives an email asking her to take a video down. In 2019, it came from an official with the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, requesting that she remove a post about abandoned employee housing near an inoperative marina. They were worried about trespassing. She obliged. In 2018, while looking for Santa Fe art dealer Forrest Fenn’s famous hidden treasure—a chest of gold and gems he’d hid somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, providing only a riddle to guide those searching for it—she came upon a spectral ranch house in New Mexico and filmed there. Just this year, a Texas woman who claimed to own the house said that Wonderhussy’s video had resulted in a trespasser problem. Wonderhussy made the post private. In her words, she’s “a nonconfrontational puss.” But she’s also familiar with the trespassing issue. That man from Florida was the second stranger in the same month to show up at her house and beg her to have his child. Then there was the time, years ago, in Las Vegas, when someone climbed up a tree and broke into her apartment to steal her underwear. “It just [gets] to me,” she says, sighing. “Everyone wants a piece of me.”
Just before Wonderhussy moved to Tecopa, her YouTube channel was cited in a 2021 Center for Biological Diversity lawsuit against the secretary of the interior, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management arguing that increased visitation at hot springs in the area was threatening the habitat of an endangered rodent: the Amargosa vole. Wonderhussy tried to curry favor with her new neighbors, volunteering on an invasive-tamarisk cleanup and helping raise thousands of dollars for the Southern Inyo County Fire Protection District. In one video, Wonderhussy takes an EcoFlight over the Amargosa River basin to learn about the region’s solar development, mineral extraction, and groundwater usage. While her content often touches on local concerns, thorny issues of land use are bigger, even, than Wonderhussy.
The alchemy of social media and the outdoors is fraught, and rural towns often don’t have the infrastructure to accommodate an influx of visitors inspired by Instagram or TikTok. In 2019, a breathtaking poppy bloom in Lake Elsinore brought tens of thousands of people to the small city; they snarled traffic and crushed flowers in their bids for photos and videos. The remote Delta Lake, in Grand Teton National Park, has seen eroded trails and expensive upkeep as a result of the thousands of visitors who found the place through geotagging on social media. The Instagram account @publiclandshateyou, which is no longer maintained, kept a list of “bad influencers,” flagging people for illegal drone usage in national parks, off-roading in restricted and sensitive areas, and bringing off-leash dogs into places where canines are not allowed. (Wonderhussy was not included on this list.) Some popular adventure YouTubers don’t engage at all when they visit places, driving around in Sprinter vans without ever meeting the actual people who live there. Some, like the couple behind the channel Kara and Nate, use their videos for product placement. Some, like Brent Underwood and Jon Bier, who bought the mining town Cerro Gordo, in the Inyo Mountains near Death Valley, have projects backed by private investments.
This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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As with these influencers’ content, the experience of watching Wonderhussy’s videos is far from actually living in the places she visits. There are elements of a romanticized West in her work—curiosity about, if not longing for, a bygone era, the years when gold prospectors could make it rich on the frontier. The West she explores is mostly white; she doesn’t spend a lot of time speaking with people of color, including Indigenous people. It’s a place that’s been formatted to fit our screens.
Wonderhussy is sensitive to concerns about trashing public lands and believes that some places should be kept secret. But she also worries about gatekeeping the natural world. Viewers tell her they could never dream of doing what she does: they’re too old; they can’t walk; they don’t have the money to travel. “I’m their live-action avatar,” she says.
Fans are lining up for Wonderhussy’s appearance at this year’s Southern Inyo County Fire Protection District fundraiser an hour before it starts. Locals are setting up booths of antiques and clothes to sell, a local bar and café will be serving pizza and beer, and a band is scheduled to play in the afternoon. But the chance to meet Wonderhussy is the event’s main draw.
I meet a man from Rhode Island and a man from Atlanta, on respective Southwest trips, who’ve made detours to see her. One California man has driven five hours that day for Wonderhussy. A man in an Evel Knievel jacket presents “Wonderhussy’s oldest fan”: his 99-year-old mom. A little girl shooting her own videos with a selfie stick takes a photo with Wonderhussy. Some wait an hour in line to speak with her.
One fan says he feels like he already knows everyone in town. “The whole Wonderhussy universe is here,” replies one of Wonderhussy’s friends. People who often show up in her videos, like Ross the One-Legged Miner, who lives in Tecopa, and Mike Z., a carpenter from Los Angeles who helps Wonderhussy around the house, are attending the fundraiser too, occasionally stopping by Wonderhussy’s booth to greet fans. An admirer brings Wonderhussy’s friend a beer just because he appeared in a recent video. Two women from Liverpool remark that they recognize the area’s geography from Wonderhussy videos. “We feel like we know Tecopa,” one of them says.
As I get ready to leave, I try to say goodbye to Wonderhussy, whom I actually call Sarah. Like everyone else who spends time with her, I’ve come to think of her as a friend. It’s hard not to. I wave, and she waves, and when I look back, she’s still talking with fans, and recording. All content, all the time.
Followers often comment that Wonderhussy appears the most “real” in her video diaries—those segments where she’s recording in her bed, laid up with COVID. Or talking about her struggles with depression. Once, she mentions that her father killed himself. She says that these moments alone in front of the camera are freeing, albeit fleeting. Usually, her fans take up that confessional space, spilling their stories to someone they, too, perceive as a friend. “I’m a good listener,” she tells me. “But eventually, it comes to a point where no one ever listens to me.”
That, really, is why she started her channel. So she could speak.•
Meg Bernhard is a journalist and essayist in Las Vegas. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the New Yorker, Harper’s, and other publications. Her book, Wine, published in 2023 as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, is a meditation on wine and power.
