The Domino Club and the pigs
The Mt. Pellier Domino Club, at 49 Mahogany Road, is the most famous bar on St. Croix and one of the odder ones in the Caribbean. It is an open-air roadside bar under a roof in the forest, known to islanders as Norma's after longtime proprietor Norma George, and it dates its license to 1971 and the pig farm behind it to the 1950s. It lists hours of Tuesday through Sunday from 8 in the morning "until," pig feeding from 10 am to 5 pm, and it is closed Mondays. Cash only, no ATM, and the food, in the club's own words, runs out when it is gone.
The pigs. There are pens beside the bar with resident pigs; the current roster on the club's site includes Hamilton, called Hammy, Chester, Kevin Bacon, Willis, Big Sip, Lil Trouble and Miss Pigsworth, and older write-ups remember Buster Pig and Ms. Piggy. For a dollar or two you go in, buy a can of non-alcoholic beer for $2 to $4, hold it out, and the pig takes the whole can from your hand, crushes it, drinks, and drops the flattened can. The tradition started when the original Buster helped himself to a visitor's beer; the non-alcoholic part is not a technicality, it is O'Doul's or the equivalent.
It is a spectacle, and it is honest to say people react two ways. Children and most adults find it very funny. Some adults find feeding animals for entertainment uncomfortable and would rather not. Both are reasonable. The pigs are farm animals on a family property that has kept pigs for seventy years, there is no alcohol involved, and nobody makes you go to the pens; plenty of visitors have a drink under the roof, watch a domino game, and skip the animals. Whatever you decide, feed them only what the bar sells, and keep small hands outside the rail. A pig that crushes a can is not gentle.
The other house specialty is MamaWanna, an infused rum the club describes as a blend of rum, honey, roots, herbs and secret spices in the Caribbean bush-rum tradition, made on site for years and now also bottled; there is even a MamaWanna imperial stout made with Leatherback Brewing. It is strong. Fresh banana daiquiris are the gentler order, and the food, when there is food, is Caribbean plates from the kitchen. Assign the driver before MamaWanna, not after; from here it is winding road in every direction.
“The food runs out when it's gone.”
The Domino Club's own website, 2026
Creque Dam and Creque Dam Road
Deep in the trees above the west coast stands the forest's best ruin. Creque Dam is an arch dam about 45 feet high, built in 1926 to hold roughly nine million gallons of drinking water for Frederiksted, back when the U.S. Navy administered the islands and the town needed a reliable supply from the wet hills. It did its job for a while and then the hills did what hills do: by 1939 the Governor's annual report was recording that "silting and increasing seepage endangered the dam structure," and the Works Progress Administration was sent in to strengthen the footing and clean out the reservoir. That New Deal repair is why the dam is still standing, and the Living New Deal project keeps a page on it.
Today it is retired. The reservoir behind it is hit or miss, sometimes a green pool and sometimes a mud flat, because the dam leaks, and moss and roots have moved onto the wall. It is not fenced off as an attraction and there is no sign, no parking lot and no ranger: a curved grey wall in a valley of kapok and mango, ferns in the seep lines, and the odd feeling of a piece of 1920s municipal engineering that the forest has decided to keep. It is a short walk from Creque Dam Road if you know where to leave the road, and a confusing one if you do not, so go with a map downloaded, in daylight, in shoes with grip.
Creque Dam Road itself (Route 58 on the maps) climbs from the coast road north of Frederiksted, past the old estates, up into the forest and across to Mahogany Road, and its upper reaches are where the unpaved Scenic Road takes off along the ridge. A normal rental car will manage the paved lower section on a dry day; the higher you go the more you want clearance, and after rain the mud is real. It is one of the best walking roads on the island because so few people drive it.
If you would rather be led, VI Eco Tours runs a three-hour guided rainforest hike out of Frederiksted, described as moderate with gentle inclines, uneven terrain and muddy patches, passing kapok, mango groves, cocoa and royal palms, stopping at estate ruins including an old dam and aqueduct, and ending at an overlook. As of 2026 it is listed at about $159 per adult, ages 8 and up, minimum four people, mornings, with pickup at the Frederiksted cruise pier. It is built around cruise-ship mornings, but anyone can book. The St. Croix Hiking Association also posts group hikes in these hills, and their reports are the best free description of the trails you will find.
- 1926Creque Dam built above Frederiksted, a 45-foot arch dam for nine million gallons of drinking water
- 1939Works Progress Administration strengthens the leaking, silted dam under the New Deal
- 1950sThe Mt. Pellier pig farm that became the Domino Club is running on Mahogany Road
- 1971The Domino Club is licensed as a bar
- 2017Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit the island and the storms expose old estate ruins along the Caledonia gut
- 2025Public Works begins drainage improvements along Mahogany Road, Route 76
- 2026St. George Village Botanical Garden holds its 30th Mango Melee in July
The Scenic Road, Mount Eagle and Blue Mountain
Above Mahogany Road runs the road that guidebooks have called one of the best little-traveled four-wheel-drive roads on the island, and they are not wrong, with a condition attached. The Scenic Road, Route 78, is unpaved dirt and rock along the ridge of the northwest hills, in and out of forest, with views down both sides of the island when the trees open. In dry weather a high-clearance 4x4 in low gear does it without drama. After rain it is ruts and clay, and it can be impassable in places; nobody grades it on a schedule you can plan around. Check whether your rental contract allows unpaved roads at all, because many say no, and read our driving guide before you commit to it.
The reason to go up is Mount Eagle. It is the highest point on St. Croix, listed variously at 1,165 feet (355 meters) and 1,160 feet; either way it is the top of the island, and a hiking trail to the summit begins at the West Scenic Road.
By local accounts it is a short climb for a big view rather than a technical hike ("little effort, big reward," one hiker's write-up calls it), and from the highest ground on the island you get the shape of the whole place: the north coast one way, the plain sloping south the other, and on a clear day the East End far off, where the villa is. If you have done Goat Hill on the East End, this is its wetter, taller twin.
Blue Mountain is the other summit people ask about, in the north-central hills east of the forest proper, and it is the one you can pick out from anywhere: it is the peak with the towers on it. Its height is quoted anywhere from about 1,070 to 1,096 feet depending on the source, so call it eleven hundred and change. It is not really a rainforest destination, more the point where the wet hills start to dry out toward Christiansted, but from either summit the pattern behind this guide is plain: the north faces green, the south faces browner, the wind coming over the top.
A word about doing this in a normal car. Do not. Every season somebody follows a maps app up the Scenic Road in a sedan and spends the afternoon waiting for a tow. If you did not rent a proper 4x4, park at the bottom and walk a stretch of the ridge instead; the forest is the same on foot and the views arrive sooner than you think. Our trails directory lists the guided options if you would rather not navigate at all.
Caledonia Valley and the gut
Caledonia is the valley in the island's northwest corner where the forest is at its thickest and where the island's one real candidate for a waterfall lives. A gut, in Virgin Islands usage, is a stream valley, usually dry, that carries water after rain, and the Caledonia gut is the wettest of them. Locals will tell you it holds pools of fresh water even in a drought and that there is a falls of around fifty feet a half-mile up; we have not measured it and would not swear to the height. What is well documented is the walk, thanks to the St. Croix Hiking Association, which has run it as a group hike.
Their description is the honest one. They rate it moderate to difficult, about an hour to reach the waterfall and about two and a half hours in all. If water is flowing you will walk in it, knee-deep in places; if it is not, you follow a damp streambed. Either way you will "crawl over and under trees, and bushes," and since the 2017 hurricanes there are estate ruins in the valley that the storms exposed. Their meeting point for the hike was the beachfront parking lot just north of Fort Frederik, which tells you how close all this is to town.
The land is understood locally to be territorial, a public gut rather than someone's yard, but there is no signed trailhead and the paths toward it may cross private land. That is the argument for going with the hiking association or a guide the first time, and for going after rain, when the falls is a falls rather than a wet rock. Never go up a gut in heavy rain or when heavy rain is forecast upstream; guts are how the hills shed water, and they do it fast.
Caledonia is also where this landscape meets the island's hardest history. The steep, roadless northwest, from the wet Caledonia valley over to Annaly and the drier Maroon Ridge above Ham's Bluff, is where people who escaped the plantations hid, and the ridge carries the name Maroon Ridge because of it. That story deserves telling properly, and we tell it in our Ham's Bluff and Maroon Ridge guide, which also covers the lighthouse hike on the coast just north of here; the Annaly tide pools, reached by a forest trail from Carambola, are the coast-level version of the same wild shore. Walk the gut knowing that the same thickness of forest that makes it hard going today is exactly what made it a refuge.
St. George Village Botanical Garden, at the forest's edge
If the forest is the wild version, the garden is the labeled one, and it belongs on the same day. St. George Village Botanical Garden sits at 127 Estate St. George off Centerline Road a few minutes east of Frederiksted, on the flat ground where the wet hills give out, and it is 16 acres of gardens laid out among the ruins of an 18th-century Danish sugar estate. The site has, by the garden's account, about 2,000 years of documented human history, from a pre-Columbian settlement to the plantation village whose factory walls and repurposed buildings you walk through. The whole property is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The plants are the reason it is here. The garden says it grows more than a thousand Caribbean and pan-tropical plants and trees, and it is much more than a pretty walk: it keeps a herbarium of more than 6,000 dried specimens representing roughly 80 percent of the plant species of the U.S. Virgin Islands, runs a seed bank, belongs to the Virgin Islands Rare Plant Initiative, and was recently accredited at Level 2 by the ArbNet arboretum program. Two self-guided tour maps are downloadable from its site, a general tour and a botanical highlights tour; take the second and you will recognize the trees on Mahogany Road afterward.
The practical facts as of 2026: open daily 9 am to 3 pm, closed Christmas Day; general admission $15 for adults, $10 for seniors and military, $2 for children under 10, with lower rates for USVI residents; phone (340) 692-2874. There is a small museum in a restored worker's cottage, and the garden hosts events through the year, the biggest being Mango Melee, its mango festival, which held its 30th edition in July 2026. Hours and prices change; check the site before you go.
Give it an hour and a half at a walking pace, and go early or late: 3 pm closing is earlier than most visitors expect, and midday sun on the open lawns is fierce even here. It pairs naturally with Estate Whim, the sugar-plantation museum a few minutes along Centerline, and it is the one stop on this loop that works fine in light rain, since the paths are short and there is roof to duck under. Children like the ruins more than the plants; that is fine, the ruins are the history.
Birds, deer, frogs: what lives here
The forest is loud, and most of the noise is birds. You will hear far more than you see, because the canopy is high and closed, but a slow walk on Creque Dam Road at first light or in the hour before dusk will show you doves on the road edges, hummingbirds at anything flowering, and, when you come out of the trees above the coast, frigatebirds hanging over the water. We keep the species list, with the ones you are likely to meet where, in our wildlife guide; bring binoculars and go quietly.
The four-legged surprises are deer. St. Croix has wild white-tailed deer, introduced long ago, and the guides who walk these valleys list them alongside the birds, lizards and frogs you can expect. You will see them most often at the edges, where forest meets pasture, and most often early. Frogs you will hear after rain, a whistling chorus that starts at dusk; lizards are everywhere, from the little anoles doing push-ups on trunks to the occasional iguana sunning at the forest edge. None of it will hurt you. There is nothing venomous in these hills, and the animal to respect is the mosquito, which the wet forest grows in numbers the East End never sees.
What you should not expect is a wildlife park. This is a working landscape of forest, small farms, houses and old estates, and the animals are wary of people for good reason. The best sightings come to people who stop the car, turn it off, and sit for ten minutes; the forest rewards patience and punishes schedules.
