Let’s Get Lost

My six-day trek through Mexico’s spectacular Copper Canyon was a grueling endurance test—and the adventure of a lifetime.

by Joe Nick Patoski

May 1999

(Page 2 of 4)

This was the home of a Tarahumara family Skip knew. We waited silently outside the fence while two children watched us from a couple hundred yards away. A small man eventually emerged from one of the shacks. Following Tarahumara custom, Skip instructed us to “shake hands” with him by brushing fingertips. The man sold us a sack of greens for soup and about one hundred pounds of dried cornstalks to feed the burros, all of which was strapped onto the back of a Tarahumara to be carried into camp.

We shuffled a quarter mile off the mesa to an overlook. On a distant ridge was our final destination, Divisadero, the village where the train stops on the canyon rim. Bill pointed his GPS toward it. “Seven miles as the crow flies,” he said. Too bad we weren’t flying.

We descended for a couple of hours until we reached a small river at the bottom of a small side canyon, a 1,300-foot drop from where we had started. The burros were penned in a rock corral nearby. I crossed the river and found Bill taking a soak in a pool of hot water. He pointed out the steam pouring from a five-foot fissure on the opposite bank, where a crude wooden cross had been posted—a sanctified sauna in a cave.

Back at camp, the Indians and mestizos gathered wood for a fire while Chunel and Antonio prepared the evening meal. Four live chickens that had been brought along were dispatched by Skip, who wrung their necks after I declined the honor.

Ray and Steve, who had lagged behind from the beginning, still hadn’t arrived. Steve had told us the night before that he was diabetic and preferred walking slowly enough to smell the flowers. “They were probably taking it easy and enjoying themselves,” Skip said, reassuring Sue. He sent Rubén to retrace our path back to the lodge. The Tarahumara are known for their running ability and endurance, and what had taken us four hours he could easily cover in one.

After we had finished our dinner of chicken, onions, and garlic fried in a woklike skillet, avocado slices, and hand-patted corn tortillas cooked on an oil-drum cover over the fire, another runner returned with a note from the lodge manager and one from Ray. He and Steve had waited on top of the mesa until sundown, then headed back to the lodge. Steve had experienced shortness of breath, Ray said, and was inclined to stay put. We wrote notes back, reassuring Steve that he had done the right thing and giving Ray directions for reconnecting with us the next morning in the company of Rubén.

I had also experienced some shortness of breath, and my calves were sore—but otherwise, no problem. The only surprise was how cold it got at night, well below 20 degrees. At Skip’s urging, I had lightened my load, bringing along only a T-shirt, an extra thermal shirt, a sweater, two extra pairs of socks, two changes of underwear, and a wool muffler and cap. I went to sleep wearing everything but the extra underwear. (“You’re going to stink like a goat,” Ray had told me earlier, laughing. “You’ll want to burn everything when it’s over.”) Luckily, one of the dogs snuggled against my tent, warming my sleeping bag.

DAY 2

WE AWOKE to sheets of ice on the puddles by the river’s edge and a revitalizing breakfast of scrambled eggs with bacon and leftover chicken, fresh tortillas, and cowboy coffee. Lunch handouts were more meager—an orange, an apple, a granola bar, peanuts, and raisins. While we warmed our hands around the campfire, Skip arched an eyebrow at me and said, “Yesterday was the last easy day.”

I smiled. Piece of cake. He told us he had heard about another hot spring, maybe the largest one in the canyons, and suggested looking for it. Only two of the Tarahumara had heard of the route, and they couldn’t agree on whether it was the trail down or the trail up and out that was more treacherous. “That means fewer guarantees than usual,” Skip said. We were game.

We left at ten, ascending about 1,500 feet in an hour and a half to another corral on a mesa. After the owner, Eligio, emerged from his cabin, we brushed fingertips and, while he whittled an ax handle, chatted in Spanish across a barbed-wire fence that was adorned with what appeared to be ribbons of audiocassette tape. Eligio had guided for Skip before, and Skip told him of our plan to search for the giant hot spring. Most of the guides worked part time at a sawmill in the area. Skip hires them during their downtime and prides himself on paying them better than the sawmill does.

Eligio produced small woven baskets his wife had made out of pine needles and sold us several for a dollar each. Three little children played nearby, pulling a teddy bear in a box with runners. Skip reached into his pocket and passed out balloons to our group, which we blew up and released in the breeze, much to the children’s delight. It was a trick he’d learned from a National Geographic photographer who had visited Copper Canyon in the mid-seventies and found that the balloons were an effective icebreaker. The kids would follow the balloons, which they had never seen before, and the normally reclusive adults would follow the kids.

A few hundred yards from Eligio’s place was the school for this small settlement. Since the eighties, the Mexican government has paid mestizo teachers handsomely to teach the Tarahumara children, a job previously held by Jesuit priests, the first whites to work and live among the Indians. I don’t know whose eyes were wider when we walked past the school—the kids’ or ours.

From the school, we followed a high-country logging road a few miles through the highlands. Skip said these routes are used by dope growers more frequently than loggers. As a result of a prolonged drought that broke only last year, marijuana has become a cash crop for the Indians; with a limited supply of water, it’s easier for them to grow than corn or beans, though their profit is minimal.

We stopped for lunch on a grassy mesa, where Ray and Rubén met up with us. A few minutes later, Eligio showed up wearing a bright, rainbow-hued wool cap: He was going down to the hot spring with us. I passed around slices of four Texas grapefruit I’d brought along. A couple of the Indians thought them too sweet. They offered me pinole, a Tarahumara staple of coarsely ground roasted corn kernels. Mixed with water, it tasted sort of like cold mush, only crunchy.

An hour later we reached an overlook facing Tararecua Canyon, the kind of deep ditch I had imagined before the trip, with sheer rock faces banded in colors and punctuated with strange-looking towers. The minute we started descending, the trail turned treacherous, becoming steep and alarmingly narrow, and sometimes disappearing altogether. “This may not be a good idea,” Skip said. “It’s a long way down there.” We pressed on for three hours, halting whenever a stubborn burro wouldn’t move or an Indian guide had to figure out a route. It was getting so dicey that whenever piedras falsas (loose rocks) were kicked off the trail, I made a point of not listening to how far they fell. Making matters worse, scree, the loose, shalelike volcanic rock that sometimes covered an entire slope, was like banana peels with hard edges.

I tried not to look at the stunning scenery around me. The last thing I needed while stumbling along a path littered with stumps, branches, thorns, cactus spines, and rocks was a case of vertigo. When we finally sighted the Tararecua River a thousand feet below us, I grabbed on to a branch to steady myself. For some time I had been aware of a flapping noise, and during a water break, I realized that the heel of my left hiking boot was coming apart. Both big toes were throbbing from being stubbed against the inside of the boots every time I tried to brake.

We finally reached the fabled hot spring, making camp at the canyon bottom by the Tararecua, which joins the Urique, the biggest river in Copper Canyon, several miles downstream. The clear, warm water was fed by numerous springs that emerged from both sides of the riverbank, many of them dammed with small rocks and perfect for a relaxing soak. Spying a waterfall that tumbled twenty feet into the river from a moss-framed fissure, I hiked over and around some boulders and took a shower.

That night, as we sat around the fire, I obsessed about my boots. They were falling apart and there were four days to go. “Wrap them in duct tape,” Skip suggested. Nice idea, only there wasn’t any duct tape.

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