St. John, US Virgin Island — Thesis Stop 1, Part 1, The Reef Bay Trail

February 21, 2020 will go down in history as one of the longest days ever for me. I had a flight out of BWI at 6:00 am. I really struggled with whether or not I wanted to drive myself there, park, and then take the shuttle over to the airport OR if I wanted to uber. I opted for uber, which was something I hadn’t done to BWI yet.

I had already been packed for about two days, so when I woke up at 3:00 in the morning I only had to double check that I had my book and my headphones. I tried going to bed at a reasonable hour, but naturally that wasn’t going to happen because why would my brain ever let that happen? Fast forward to 3:30 am, I’m got in to my uber with a driver who was an incredibly nice lady, we small talked most of the 25 minute drive there. I arrived at the airport around 4 and I was dying, but excited! Security and everything was a breeze, got to my gate and hung out.

Arrived in FLL around 8:30, had a long layover until after 1:00 pm, but then I finally got to St. Thomas around 4:47 local time. Now, I had to go find the rental car that Sally and I got and then find Sally. Got the rental car, had to drive on the left side of the road (which was incredibly easy to get use to after a day or so), and find my way to the boar ferry where Sally was meeting me so we could go over to St. John.

Previous to coming to St. John I had kind of an idea of what I wanted my project to be about. The more I thought about National Parks the more I thought about how we stole the land and started questioning what other histories may be tied to the land. Before going to St. John I did some reading and it turns out that most of the land in the National Park has a really dark slave background. Having this knowledge before hand definitely change my perspective as we were going on these hikes.

Sally had a jam packed itinerary for us filled with lots of trees, and lots of hiking (our MO when we go anywhere). We started off on the Reef Bay trail, or so we thought we started off on the Reef Bay trail. We actually started off in a random pass through that took us ~3 miles off coarse of the Reef Bay trail. However, this fake trail was beautiful and I took one of my favorite photos to date on it.

Once we got to the bottom of the fake Reef Bay trail and realized we then needed to go 3 miles back up we found a nice taxi driver who kindly drove us back to were the trail began and showed us the actual entrance to it. In the grand scheme of things we should have gone and got more water here because I’m about to die of heat stroke on this hike. I don’t actually die, but I’m a fan of the drama.

So, we’re on the Reef Bay trail now and it’s beautiful. This was the trail that I knew had the ties with slavery since the selling point for the trail is ruins from a sugar mill where slaves were put to work. The trail offered a beautiful landscape with some wildlife, but from a wildlife statement it was a rather quiet trail. Other then the ruins, another big draw to the trail are the Taíno petroglyph carvings found in the rock back a waterfall. The waterfall was a small trickle when we were there due to lack of rain, but it was still lovely to see.

The trail ends on the ocean with one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen. Sadly, I didn’t take my film camera out for that landscape.