Nevis Peak wears a cap of white cloud almost every day of the year, and that cap is how the island got its name. A sixteenth-century mapmaker read the crown as a miraculous snowfall in the tropics and called the place Nuestra Señora de las Nieves — Our Lady of the Snows. The island is little more than this 985-metre volcano and the land around it: its five parishes are cut like pie slices from the coast to the top and meet at a single point on the summit. Nothing has erupted here in recorded history, and the youngest lava dome in the summit crater is roughly 100,000 years old — yet the volcano still steams and boils at the shoreline. Climbing it means climbing through its climate zones: dry scrub, then rainforest, then a dripping cloud forest of tree ferns and orchids where green vervet monkeys crash overhead.
The way up is hard physical work. Four to five hours of root, rock and red mud lead into sections so steep that you pull yourself up on ropes strung tree to tree; gloves matter as much as boots. The top is a small grassy clearing hemmed in by bush, with no bare rock and no open ledge. When the cloud lifts, St Kitts appears across the channel and Montserrat sits low on the horizon. Most people meet the mountain more gently. From the sand at Pinney's Beach the green pyramid stands behind the palms, the botanical gardens lie at its foot, and at Bath a hot spring still fills the stone bath that drew the Caribbean's first hotel guests. Between June and October, turtles nest on the beaches around the volcano. Wherever you go on Nevis the cone is behind you, changing by the hour as cloud gathers and slides off its shoulders.