we've heard about them and imagined what it would be like to be in them the hiding places of the maroons the caves along the treacherous northwest coast of the island stories of secret caves have been handed down from generation to generation few claim to have seen them and even fewer claim to have entered them are these caves real or are they just legend it's a question worth investigating and today we're on a mission to find and enter what i consider personally to be the most sacred place on this island now i've been told that it's a treacherous height to the cave the terrain is rough and the pathways are very narrow but this is something i definitely have to do and with a little help from our friend brian updike of virgin kayak i'm sure we'll be able to reach our destination let's go meet him and start this adventure good i'm fine now i've been told that we're going to a very sacred place today um how did you go about finding this place well it um it was it was a long a long effort probably about 14 years i really found the location from kayaking from cane bay around the bluff studying the uh the shoreline studying the rocks one day finding a spot thinking to myself if there is this cave that's where it would be and sure enough that's where it ended up being so um maybe by maybe by chance or persistence but um that's that's how i found it how hard is it to get there uh it's a pretty pretty strenuous hike i mean if it was easy to get there it wouldn't have been um perhaps as uh effective of a hiding place but um i'm sure we can do it if we get moving okay question though are we gonna be able to get out of there once we find it that that's no problem we can certainly certainly find our way back okay good let's go okay again we'll be exploring the northwest area of saint croix historically this is the area where slaves on the island fled to in an attempt to escape colonial rules centuries ago the slaves known as maroons used the rough and treacherous terrain to their advantage 16 and 17th century accounts by european settlers describe the area as quote almost impassable although there are written accounts of the maroons escape through this area there is very little archaeological evidence of their actual settlements some historians believe that once chased to the edge of maroon ridge the maroons jumped to their deaths choosing to die free than to live as a slave however others believed that the maroons hid in caves along the coast where they waited for boats to transport them to puerto rico i have no no doubt in my mind and of course i'm a i'm a person with a major passion for history i have no doubt in my mind that it was wasn't it's not a myth it's definitely it's definitely the cave where these runaways perhaps would have used it i have no doubt in my mind it's uh it's very difficult to find and looking down from the top side you would have um you would have guessed that the slaves probably leaped off the edge into the sea but of course they they didn't do that as you're going to find out it is not a place you would want to take your grandmother on a hike it's not a place that i recommend people necessarily to go and pursue inside the cave it's it's a very claustrophobic environment it's very black in there there's you would not want to go in there and just say well let's go in the cave and hang out as kids or or or people um to check it out it's it's a place you would go in as a last ditch effort and and pack pack quite a few in there if you had to now it's been several years since mr updike has been in or even seen the cave he's confident however that we'll be able to find it but the fact that the maroon caves have been a secret for so long tells me this search isn't going to be easy hiking with us is ivan butcher a long time resident who's been searching for the caves for over 20 years right off the bat you can see how rough the terrain is we're just a few seconds into the hike and we already have to take it very slow as we walk this some of this obviously got a little bit of water on it so watch your footing this watch one good thing about our pace it allows us to take in the beautiful scenery this around here is some incredible shoreline back on this side but if we are to find these caves we need to keep it moving and we need to always remain alert are we going to go back on that side ah boy good thing i took valley all those years okay all right okay i think i'm kind of stuck here we've decided to take the search to higher grounds with rising tides as a constant threat we figured that the caves may have been in an area that would remain above the tide it's really steep it looks kind of steep we've been climbing for about 20 minutes and as you can see it's very tiring this is a workout boy how much longer i'm hoping that my stamina and tolerance for pain is at an all-time high today because these caves are proving difficult to find what makes this climb harder the christmas bush you see all over the area yeah you know the poisonous plant that can cause severe lung problems and in some cases death yeah that christmas bush the terrain is just really rough the water is crashing against the rocks i mean it was it was it was fun though adventurous i don't think if you're if you're not brave don't try it but i'm enjoying it this is my kind of stuff right here but i it's very it's very rough it's very hot hard and the sun is coming out so let's see how much more of this i can take you got to drop down around the hook and then go through the ledge and on a bright sunny day looking down over the top of this thing and back under the ledge you can't your eyes can't adjust to the darkness that the ledge creates on the back back wall where there's a hole big enough for a full-size guy to crawl through on his belly wow when you go through the hole and my wife and others will testify they couldn't believe when they saw me crawl through stand up and walk away getting over there right now is not going to be real real easy for us um that's where we got to go course coming off the front of that it's pretty much straight down into the soup we're now about 80 feet above sea level and so far no signs of caves anywhere we've been hiking for over an hour so at this point it's time to take our search closer to sea level the problem is where do we go from here no one knows okay so i admit my singing isn't my best talent that's john one of the crew members as you can see everyone is having a difficult time with this adventure right now these two are trying to figure out where we are we passed a two hour mark on our hike and our spirits are starting to get low we're going to call this face of the of the hill of ham's bluff i would say without a doubt this is what they refer to as maroon hole we've got hollowing outs and all these crevices but we haven't found the cave yet of course the landscape has has changed i personally think we might have went a little high above it we are looking for rock that is laying more flat more in line with the horizon this stuff is all pushed up like this but all of this is creating caves all through this little cracks you could find a number of spots up in here to hide and crawl into the cave we're looking for is big enough easily for 10 people to go in that's not what we're looking at right now could have walked right over the top of it and would have never never known you just walked over the top of it i think with the surf coming in today it probably shot us up a little bit higher what i'm going to suggest if we backtrack and say stay low and we'll cross our fingers that the bush hasn't grown over the opening of the cave but we're darn too close so we're gonna give it one more try so far we've hiked all over the place we went up we went down we came across right now we're trying to we think we may have passed the cave so we're trying to stay lower down um hopefully we'll find it this time i really want to find it um so i really hope i think we should be able to find it we're going back back now to look on a lower level this is absolutely beautiful we're still in search of the caves off in a distance it appears mr updike and mr butcher have come across something it looks like it's big enough for someone to climb through we come up closer but it's very sweet at this point we're not sure what we're looking at it seems somewhat like a cave but it's very small and not as exciting as i thought it would be it does appear to have some type of opening at the back wall maybe we have something here so mr updike's gonna take a closer look for us i should mention that the space is very dark that's why i'm holding a light for mr updike we actually found the cave we came all this way to look for um right now we're in at the entrance and we're about to go in uh mr updike is already in there and he's saying about ten of us can fit in there so we're gonna go and be adventurous and go in and shoot around so you guys can see for yourselves okay come on and here we are in the cave oh my gosh i am so like shot right now we are actually inside a cave okay and you know around us like mr updike can you tell us a little bit about what what characteristic this cave has that makes you really believe that it's where the maroons may have been well i think the hole that we crawled through to get into the cave was modified by man it's too it's too symmetrical it's too round it just seems out of place for mother nature had to just made a nice hole big enough for a human but i gotta say it's easy to pass by that hole and say oh no there's nothing back in there of course right now well at first i think we're about ready to go and give it up but even behind us here we have not with a lot of room but room enough at least one or two guys could fold up in there and hide again what we're looking at as far as the cave is all of these formations coming down from the ceiling are stalag i believe there's some stalactites coming down from the top they're dripping water look at this stalagmite here on the bottom shaped like a big old tooth on this one right here you know these this one here could be hundreds of years old it takes so long for that kind of a formation with mineral deposits and so forth as it drips um we've got a lot of stuff here's a double one hanging from the ceiling but it is definitely um with all characteristic characteristics a a cave no um no denounce in the cave part of it um and and i also wouldn't be surprised there's more through these rocks but this one i have a hunch with a hiding place without a doubt it just seems uh it seems like i like i said that that opening to come in was worked a little bit and um wouldn't want to have to hide in here very long i mean you would never believe that this was behind here looking from the outside in there's no clue you have no clue you actually have to come in to experience this this is crazy okay i can't just i can't begin to explain how amuse how amazing this is wow wow once the excitement wears off you begin to realize the historical significance of the cave at least for those of us in the cave it verifies the plight of the maroons their constant efforts to escape slavery and live as free men and women to to going with um one of our hikers was sweeney she said that when she when she came up it was a very experi spiritual experience and i find that uh after all these years trying to get here it was worth every moment i want to thank you for that the opportunity to find this and uh i'm definitely going to pass the experience on to other people in terms of the education and training this is beautiful and to think that the slaves came up this way without shoes and clothes you know we we got boots and comfortable and this is this wasn't easy that's right and they did it often you know so i'll take my hat off today it's hard to imagine anything on this island that will top the experience i just had but there is something that can come cooked and guess what it's very close to where we are for now we say goodbye to maroon ridge and travel less than a quarter mile to this area a place that literally defines the expression of when it rains it pours we're still in the northwest region of the island actually we're just on the opposite side of maroon ridge the person we're following into the bush is dr william cole you remember him right the fish and wildlife official that showed us the saint croix ground lizard well today dr cole is going to take us to see a few waterfalls okay i know what you're thinking saint croix doesn't have any waterfalls but actually it does they're not always running but whenever the clouds open up and produce heavy showers we get this this stream of water is a result of the falls and to see the falls we have to hike up the stream bed now the stream runs for about over a mile it's a very long and slow walk to the falls the rocks are very slippery and there are holes throughout the stream bed that can reach five feet deep despite the long hike the experience is great you can walk from one end to the other between i'd say two and four hours depending on how fast you walk on a day like today it slows you down significantly because most of the time you're walking in the water and so it's slippery and it's hard to see what you're stepping in and sometimes you'll step it into a in between a couple stones and twist an ankle or something like that about halfway through the hike we come across this little fall normally this fall doesn't run as dr cole said it takes a significant amount of rain to produce what we are seeing according to some local wildlife officials there are about six to seven falls on the island ranging in height from 20 to 35 feet historically these falls ran from october to march the main raising season for the island but decreasing rainfall over the past decade has made what was once a constant flow a sporadic occurrence it's a low head dam um i don't know what the age is or anything on it but it's um it's an artificial structure it was put in back when this is part of a road that was walking up um so we put it in back when we were doing agriculture in the valley here an interesting thing about this stream is that you can find a variety of fresh fish and shrimp in it after about an hour and a half of walking we finally reach the first waterfall it's about 20 to 25 feet high and it's actually the smallest of three falls in the area it's cascading type meaning the water runs over a rock formation the other two falls in the area are more horsetail and plunge type waterfalls meaning they have more of a free fall we're here at the bottom of the first waterfall or the lowest waterfall in caledonia gut you see the waterfall in the background this is an area that's pretty much undisturbed by human development when we get up to this point several waterfalls on up where we have the sustainable farm is part of a new new program that i think the university of georgia is working on to try and teach people about tropical forestry and agriculture unfortunately because of an injury to one of our crew members we won't be able to hike the other two falls however this one will do just fine these falls generally are not running we've had several weeks of rainfall on and off and in fact just yesterday i was up here in the waterfalls had maybe a quarter of the amount of water coming down it so the water that we had coming down today was enough to really boost the water levels not only here but throughout the rest of the island too the thing is that most of the rain when it hits soaks into the soil when the soil gets saturated with water it can't soak any more in that's when our streams and guts start to run more and that's what's happened today so we've got a lot of water coming down the waterfall today and a lot of the other guts on the island as well there's a lot of wildlife that uses the watershed as a whole and that's everything from birds to our mammals and even fish the birds of course can fly from pond to pond and drink what i am particularly interested in here is a lot of the invertebrates in the vertebrates so we've got several different species of shrimp we've got species of fish at least two a mountain mullet and a gobi of which none of them we've really seen today because the water level is too high typically you'll find these fish when the water level starts to go down and it doesn't run you'll see them in the pools and if you're really really patient and you're looking amongst the leaf litter in the bottom of the pools you'll start to see the shrimps moving and you'll see a leaf moving for no reason at all and usually underneath that is a shrimp or a fish or something that's hiding out so one of the things i'm interested in right now is to find out how long does it take to repopulate the stream because it was almost completely dry just a couple weeks ago even a couple days ago we didn't have water flowing through it so how long does it take for those fish to repopulate the pools and stuff would be a very very interesting project it's been a fantastic day of discovery from hidden caves to tropical waterfalls it's an experience i'll always remember and i hope that you'll always remember to cherish your home this beautiful island but most of all cherish each other we'll see you next time you