Just Keep Hiking

Monday, January 28th, we started our morning on the Reef Bay Trail for a nice hike to start our day. The hike is close to 3 miles long. Get ready for a lot of pictures to come!

Doc went tarantula fishing -- I was not one to do this

This is a Kapok Tree, it is most known for the face on the trunk or otherwise known as a wrinkled grey elephant.

Here is the "face" of the Kapok Tree

This wall was built by the enslaved people to keep the animals in.

We hiked up to the petroglyphs which are rock carvings. These were carved around 900-1500AD by the pre- Columbian Taino and their ancestors. The carvings exemplify the designs found on ceremonial Taino pottery. The pool and symbols were sacred dwelling places and ritualistic sites for the spirits of their ancestors.

Below to the right of me you are able to see some of the petroglyphs

No matter how much rainfall the pool below this stays at nearly the same level

As we continued to hike down we stopped at the Reed Bay Sugar Mill. The sugar industry died twice . In the pictures below are empty rooms and stone corral overlapping ruins from two different eras. In the plantation days, slaves brought bundles of cane to the horse mill. In 1861, after Denmark abolished slavery and St. John's other mills began to collapse, Reef Bay's new owners attempted to revive the dying industry by installing steam power to crush the cane. Reef Bay was the last operating sugar mill on the island.

This was the boiling house where they boiled down cane juice to make crude brown sugar.

This old steam engine was built in Glasgow, Scotland in 1861.

This is a Turpentine Tree, also knows as "the tourist tree" because it gets red and peels.

To get back to the car we walked along the beach and over these awesome rocks