Outdoor Adventures 
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.
Ysabel says: I would like to know about Skip, I knew him many years ago in Michigan when I as at Wayne. I am Ysabel from Peru By my e-mail wangoperu@gmail.com My comments are this beautiful places he described are so similar in Peru. Here we used to visit Cusco for example (May 5th, 2009 at 10:45pm)
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DAY 3
“Yesterday was the last easy day,” Skip told me as I examined the heel of my left boot after breakfast. We spent most of the morning following the river downstream on a fairly flat trail, looking for a way back up to the rim. One guide noticed a fellow Tarahumara who had been shadowing us on the other side of the river. After a few exchanged shouts, we met at a crossing, everyone brushing fingertips. He lived in a cave nearby and knew a route out. Skip did some quick bargaining and hired him for the afternoon.
The trail network in the Sierra is something like an airline’s hub-and-spoke system. Individual Indians know their own local routes—from home to their fields, their water source, other houses, and to market—but little else. People like Skip try to make sense of each little network and link them for a long-distance journey. It was a good thing we found someone knowledgeable about this particular path, because no one else in our party seemed to know the way.
The new guide figured it was two and a half hours to the top; but by Bill’s calculation, there would be a three-thousand-foot gain in elevation, meaning it could take all day. The path was even more ill-defined than the trail down the day before, and as temperatures warmed into the seventies I was slugging down gulps of water every five minutes. The burros were becoming downright skittish, stopping on switchbacks that were made slick by thick beds of dead pine needles.
Tensions frayed as the burro wranglers cursed their charges, waving their hands and shouting. I hydrated deliriously. Even the Tarahumara were taking swigs. Making room for a burro scooting around a small boulder, Aine was nearly killed when one of its packs knocked her off balance onto a slippery slope; she saved herself by grabbing the burro and pulling herself back up.
Finally the rim came into view. We had stopped for another breather, leaning into the slope of the trail because there was nowhere else to lean, when the silence was broken by the sound of crashing rocks above us. It was a loud, extended clattering that carried considerable bulk with it and lasted for several seconds. A burro? A hiker?
“Burro,” came a shout from above, accompanied by the loud wail of what sounded like a goat. Aine and Sue thought it was a joke. We sat and waited in silence. What was it?
Five minutes later, the word filtered down. It was a burro, now a very dead burro. It had lost its balance and gone into a free fall.
The mood shifted from mere exhaustion to nervous exhaustion laced with somber introspection. We made it to the top and passed through a mesa village with a church, a school, and a store before making camp another mile farther on. The burro’s death was a grim reminder that it could have been any one of us. The burros were scheduled to go back in the morning because the rest of the trail was too difficult for them to negotiate, and Sue confided that she was thinking of going back with them.
I hadn’t thought much about the real world I’d left behind, only that it was a weekend and my kids must be playing somewhere and my wife was likely shuttling them around. Here, in a place with no power lines, no television, no mechanical sounds, not even any planes flying overhead, it was hard to imagine what they were doing. My calves ached and my feet had blisters. The heel of my boot had completely fallen off, although the foam inner heel appeared intact.
After a dinner of two soups, a vegetable stew, and quesadillas, Skip broke out four bottles of tequila. The normally shy Tarahumara became animated while taking sips out of soda cans and plastic water bottles that had been cut in half. In the firelight their faces took on a mystical quality. The campfire, a part of human life since the dawn of history, had vanished from my modern world. Here, among the Tarahumara, it was still the social event of the day.
DAY 4
At breakfast Sue announced that she’d had enough. Ray, a concerned husband as well as a conscientious guide, would accompany her on the mostly flat, twenty-mile hike back to the lodge, along with several guides, the burros, and two of the dogs. That left Richard the photographer, Bill the Geek, and me. Skip urged us to lighten our load. My tent was so big, he said, couldn’t we double up? But Richard snored and Bill liked his privacy. So did I. And after having given up my extra pair of shoes before leaving the lodge, I was no longer inclined to be so agreeable. In fact, we were all as stubborn as burros, so all three tents were packed into duffel bags to be carried by the Indians for the rest of the journey. We’d have to carry our own day packs.
Around eleven, after Ray and Sue’s group had headed back, we finally left. A Tarahumara named Corpus who lived near our campsite (we dubbed him Corpus Number Two) and his seven-year-old son, Juan, joined the expedition. The scenery on our descent into the widest chasm yet became more surreal with each step. A nearby mesa where most of the Indians on the expedition lived appeared to be suspended in air. We could look back and see a notch on the horizon where we had started the trip. Far below us, so far that we couldn’t see the rivers that had carved it, was the bend where the Copper and Tararecua canyons meet. The first spring we reached was dry, and we were advised to start rationing our water, though quenching thirst was key to staying sane and stable on the hike. Skip didn’t help matters. Whenever someone slipped, he’d say, “Adiós.”
Four and a half hours after we had left camp, we finally spied the Tararecua River, which was so far below us it triggered a flash of acrophobia. “Focus on the boots in front of me,” I kept repeating to myself. “Don’t look down.” Half an hour later, I looked. What I saw was a landscape of dreams. Canyons fantastic and dramatic. Cliffs so sheer and steep they appeared to have been sliced off, one eon at a time. Canyons beyond canyons, rugged and sublime. And all of it was shrouded in silence, witnessed only by us. “Beautiful canyon,” Chunel whispered, the first time I had heard him speak in English. I nodded. Increíble. Incredible.
It was nearly sunset when we reached the Tararecua for the second time on the trip. We had dropped 3,600 feet that afternoon. The nimble-footed tortilla girls had arrived almost an hour ahead of us, along with the guides packing our gear. The skidding on the way down had taken a heavy toll on my boots: The heel of the right one was coming unglued, and the seams on both had begun to split. The boots had become as flimsy as ballet slippers. My big toes ached, making it hard to take another step. Sand fleas and bloodsucking gnats found me before I dropped my backpack by the river. I was grateful when Corpus Number Two and Juan led me to a hot spring a quarter mile away, where I soaked my feet.
Dinner was lentil soup and chile chilaca, long peppers not unlike New Mexico Big Jims. We threw them on the fire until the skin turned black, peeled them and removed the seeds, then put the roasted pepper strips on big chunks of Mennonite cheese (Mennonite farmers dominate the agriculture of the Cuauhtémoc region of Chihuahua) and melted the cheese on tortillas. Delicious. When I finally headed to my tent, I was startled by an eerie glow on a canyon wall high above us. It came from the cave of a goatherd we had seen earlier, who we learned was Corpus Number Two’s aunt. From Divisadero, you can see dozens of fires like that, Richard said, flickering throughout the canyon at night.
DAY 5
We were on the trail before the sun broke over the canyon rim, tailing Sahuaripa, the most surefooted of the Tarahumara, up a slope so steep that two phrases from Spanish obituaries, se murió (“he died”) and ha fallecido (“has expired”), kept popping into my head. We continued on for another half hour, then began skirting around a cliff. Its slope was so exaggerated, it was hard to believe that any life-forms could exist here, and yet there were goat pills on the path and the sounds of a rooster crowing and dogs barking. Homes, built under overhangs and into the cliffside, were everywhere, but we glimpsed only a few of their inhabitants, who poked their heads from behind walls when they thought we weren’t watching.
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