USVI 2015 - Day 4, Part 1: Dawn Hike to Ram Head

January 19th was a jam-packed kind of day, so I'm going to break it down into at least 2 parts. This one's mostly about pictures because it was a spectacular hike, I took a ton of pictures and they'll do more justice - you can skip straight down to those if you want although I will give a little description too.

The hike was up to a high point of land called Ram Head, which you can see on yesterday's chart (bottom edge, just out from our 2nd mooring site of the day); Kat and Jenn said this really had to be done early in the day because although it's only a couple of miles start to finish, there's basically no shelter from the sun once you start to climb and a bunch of people from winter-land would find this very hard once the sun began to climb. Even with the early start, I worked up quite a sweat.

The destination was beautiful, but once again there was sad history here -- there was at one point a slave rebellion; the rebels actually succeeded in taking the island and holding it for several months, but in the end, troops were brought in to put down the revolt, and many of the rebels leaped from the cliffs here at Ram Head rather than be recaptured.

Still, much beauty here and a few fun surprises. Jacob was once again kind enough to play guide for us, he had us try the hot-pink cactus fruits along the trail, which were delicious, tangy-sweet, (I would not have even thought of trying them otherwise, I don't know the plants there and there are things there that you will regret putting in your mouth -- Jacob had told us about one of those that I'll try to come back to at some point) and pointed out other interesting things, including the handsome golden orb weaver spiders tending their webs in the breezes at the top of the cliff (I borrowed TQ's photo of the spiders as they were much better than mine). The one more barren-looking photo towards the end is Salt Pond, where at certain times of the year when there hasn't been rain for a while, you can collect salt - there'd been a fair bit of rain though so at this time there was none to be found.

All done writing now, you can just click on the first picture and go through in the slideshow view.