Trekking the Unspoiled Peaks of Saba Island

The landing at Juancho E. Yrausquin Airport is brief, violent, and unforgettable. Measuring just 1,312 feet, the runway sits pinned between a sheer rock wall and a three-hundred-foot drop straight into the churning Atlantic. As the Twin Otter turboprop descended through the clouds, the rock face of Mount Scenery filled the cabin windows—a vertical wall of dark basalt covered in wet, tangled vegetation. The plane touched down, its tires barking against the asphalt, and reversed throttles with a roar that echoed off the cliffs.

When the engines finally spooled down, the silence that took their place was absolute, broken only by the steady hiss of the wind off the channel.

Saba is not the Caribbean of postcard clichés. There are no long stretches of blinding white sand, no beach bars serving frozen rum drinks, and no sprawling beach resorts. Instead, this five-square-mile island—the tip of a dormant stratovolcano rising five thousand feet from the ocean floor—offers a landscape of dramatic verticality. Everything on Saba is either up or down. The single main road, built entirely by hand over two decades after engineers declared the terrain impossible, snakes along the mountain spine, connecting tiny villages of red-roofed cottages that seem to hang suspended over the sea.

My guide for the morning was James Lindqvist, a fifth-generation Saban whose ancestors arrived on the island in the late seventeenth century. We met at dawn in the village of Windwardside, where the morning mist still clung to the dark volcanic stones of the garden walls. James wore heavy boots, a worn canvas pack, and carried a thick walking stick carved from local mahogany.

“Most people look at Saba from a boat and think it’s hostile,” James said, pointing his stick up toward the peak of Mount Scenery, which was shrouded in a dense cap of gray cloud. “They see the cliffs and the rocks and keep sailing. But if you walk up into the mountain, the island completely opens up. It’s like entering a different country every five hundred feet.”

Our objective was the summit of Mount Scenery, the highest point in the Kingdom of the Netherlands at 2,855 feet above sea level. The trail begins as a series of steep concrete steps laid into the hillside, passing through private gardens filled with hibiscus, wild orchids, and fruit trees laden with mangoes. As we climbed, the village below shrank into a grid of white and red dots set against the deep blue of the Caribbean Sea.

Within twenty minutes, the concrete gave way to mud, wet stone, and exposed tree roots. The temperature dropped noticeably, and the dry scrub forest of the lower slopes transformed into a lush, dripping cloud forest. High tree ferns arched overhead like green cathedral vaults, their fronds catching the moisture from the passing clouds and dripping continuously onto the forest floor. Elephant ears with leaves the size of dining tables lined the narrow path, while wild heliconias flashed bright red and yellow against the deep green background.

The physical exertion of the climb was relentless. The incline rarely relaxed, requiring a steady, rhythmic pace that left little breath for casual conversation. My lungs burned in the cool, damp air, and my legs felt the weight of every vertical step. Yet there was a hypnotic quality to the movement. With every hundred feet of elevation gained, the ambient sound shifted: the distant rumble of the ocean surrendered to the sharp calls of the red-billed tropicbirds nesting in the cliff faces and the wind rushing through the canopy.

Near the two-thousand-foot mark, the trail narrowed along a knife-edge ridge. To the left, the land dropped away into the deep gouge of Ladder Bay, where early settlers once carried all imported goods—including pianos and building supplies—up a staircase of 800 stone steps cut into the sheer rock face. Looking down through a gap in the mist, the water below was so clear that the dark outlines of the underwater volcanic pinnacles were visible beneath the surface.

“This island forces you to be present,” James remarked, stopping to check the grip on his boots before tackling a slippery section of wet basalt. “You can’t hurry up this trail, and you can’t walk it while thinking about something else. Step in the wrong place, and you’re going down.”

The final scramble to the summit required using both hands, gripping wet roots and handholds carved into the rock. When we finally reached the high point—a narrow rocky outcrop surrounded on three sides by precipitous drops—the view was entirely obscured by cloud. We sat on the cold damp stone, wrapped in fog so thick it reduced visibility to twenty feet, listening to the wind roar across the peak.

Then, without warning, the wind shifted. A strong gust blew in from the east, ripping a hole through the cloud deck.

For thirty seconds, the entire island was revealed below us in breathtaking scale. To the east, the village of Windwardside gleamed in a patch of morning sunlight; to the west, the razor-sharp ridge of the island sloped steeply into the sea; and thirty miles across the water, the blue silhouettes of St. Maarten and St. Barthélemy floated on the horizon. The sheer scale of the landscape was dizzying—a dramatic monument to the raw geological forces that shaped the region.

Just as quickly as it had opened, the fog rolled back in, wrapping the peak in white once more.

We began the descent in silence, taking slow, deliberate steps to navigate the slick stones. Lower down, at a private villa tucked into the hillside above The Bottom, dinner was prepared using local ingredients: pan-seared red snapper caught off the Saban bank, roasted sweet potatoes, and a reduction made from local guavaberries.

Sitting on the terrace as twilight fell, watching the lights of the fishing boats twinkling thousands of feet below, the physical exhaustion of the climb resolved into a profound sense of clarity. Saba does not cater to comfort; it demands effort. In return, it offers a rare, untamed encounter with a Caribbean that remains rugged, wild, and entirely indifferent to the modern world.

More Caribbean Travel Guides