As I picked my way over hot rocks and bubbling mud in the pouring rain, I realized Dominica was not for the faint-hearted.

I was hiking to the Boiling Lake, a bizarre cauldron of steaming-hot water, 200 feet across, and one of the strangest sights on this rugged and beautiful Caribbean island.

The hike is a six-hour round trip that runs through dense rainforest and over mountain ridges before emerging in the Valley of Desolation -- an eerie, treeless swath of volcanic devastation striped black and orange with mineral deposits and swirling with mist and steam.

Like so much in Dominica, the journey takes effort -- but it's worth it.

This jagged, densely rainforested island, about 29 miles long and 16 miles wide, is located between Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Eastern Caribbean, 375 miles southeast of San Juan, Puerto Rico. A poor country of 71,000 dependent on agriculture and tourism, Dominica brands itself the Caribbean's "Nature Island," and the name is justified.

As I picked my way over hot rocks and bubbling mud in the pouring rain, I realized Dominica was not for the faint-hearted.

I was hiking to the Boiling Lake, a bizarre cauldron of steaming-hot water, 200 feet across, and one of the strangest sights on this rugged and beautiful Caribbean island.

The hike is a six-hour round trip that runs through dense rainforest and over mountain ridges before emerging in the Valley of Desolation -- an eerie, treeless swath of volcanic devastation striped black and orange with mineral deposits and swirling with mist and steam.

Like so much in Dominica, the journey takes effort -- but it's worth it.

This jagged, densely rainforested island, about 29 miles long and 16 miles wide, is located between Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Eastern Caribbean, 375 miles southeast of San Juan, Puerto Rico. A poor country of 71,000 dependent on agriculture and tourism, Dominica brands itself the Caribbean's "Nature Island," and the name is justified.

As I picked my way over hot rocks and bubbling mud in the pouring rain, I realized Dominica was not for the faint-hearted.

I was hiking to the Boiling Lake, a bizarre cauldron of steaming-hot water, 200 feet across, and one of the strangest sights on this rugged and beautiful Caribbean island.

The hike is a six-hour round trip that runs through dense rainforest and over mountain ridges before emerging in the Valley of Desolation -- an eerie, treeless swath of volcanic devastation striped black and orange with mineral deposits and swirling with mist and steam.

Like so much in Dominica, the journey takes effort -- but it's worth it.

This jagged, densely rainforested island, about 29 miles long and 16 miles wide, is located between Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Eastern Caribbean, 375 miles southeast of San Juan, Puerto Rico. A poor country of 71,000 dependent on agriculture and tourism, Dominica brands itself the Caribbean's "Nature Island," and the name is justified.