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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Each inhabited cave was near a shady spring where oaks, castor beans, mint, and lush grasses flourished. The third spring we passed had cool, clear water that dripped into a hollowed-out log and a steel barrel. We filled our jugs, using the small can provided as a scoop. We had gained more than two thousand feet and were smack dab in the proverbial middle of nowhere. Nevertheless, discarded cracker cartons, wrappers for laundry soap, and little pieces of plastic were scattered along the trail. Disposing of trash isn’t a problem here: It is merely dropped on the ground or tossed down the slope.
One stone dwelling was set on an isolated point, like an eagle’s aerie, overlooking a vista of several canyons that literally took my breath away. “These people have come here to get as far away as they can from other people,” Skip said. “They’ve come for this.” The grandeur of the setting made me question all the rhetoric about how the Tarahumara need to be helped because their way of life—subsistence farming—yields so little income. I could see that their paradise was here. “Yeah,” Skip said, “let’s educate their kids, move them to the city, teach them how to make money, so they can buy a high-rise condo. Show me a penthouse with a better view than this.”
We skirted more cliffs, then stopped at the edge of a plateau. “Okay, I’m done,” Skip said, plopping onto the ground. Before us was the grandest expanse of canyons I could imagine, filling the entire landscape. I had never seen anything in nature so perfectly poetic, so emotionally overpowering. Although the slopes appeared verdant, almost soft, they were impassable to all but the eagles and the turkey buzzards we watched soaring on air currents below us.
We sat there on the edge for a long while without speaking, and I said a silent prayer of thanks for this earthly masterpiece. Finally, Skip broke the silence. “Only a handful of mestizos or gringos or even Tarahumara have ever seen this,” he said. After what we’d been through, it wasn’t hard to believe.
We continued skirting cliffs for several hours, passing still more dwellings and scootching over tight spots where one false move would mean instant death. With absolutely no room for error, this skirting was the most difficult part of the hike. “Pasitos, pasitos,” Chunel whispered, noting my wobbly progress. Little steps. We finally spied camp a long way down—a maple grove along a creek in the bottom of a side canyon with no name—and started our descent. When I stumbled in, every vein in my arms prickled with the tiniest movement, as if all circulation had been cut off. My hands were so swollen you couldn’t see the knuckles. I knew I’d pushed it to the limit.
The rest of the party had been there long enough for the tortilla girls to soak and cook a pot of pinto beans that sent up a tantalizing aroma. The site was a sliver of the tropics, just below a citrus grove fat with oranges, limes, and grapefruit as well as avocados. Skip was elated that the farmer who tended the plot had been able to grow a crop again. Five years earlier, his grove had been sprayed with Paraquat by Mexican soldiers who were destroying marijuana crops, wiping out everything and forcing him to move elsewhere. Now he was back.
Daylight was fading fast, but I had time to soak my feet in the cold water of a spring before scarfing down my final supper—the pinto beans, some Mennonite cheese, three oranges, and a delicious soup made from leftovers. With all the climbing, descending, and skirting, we had gained 700 feet, Bill said; we would have to ascend another 3,500 before we would reach Divisadero. The temperature was so mild that, for the first time, I slept without my socks and jeans. I paid for it with a rash of bug bites around my ankles.
DAY 6
I felt surprisingly little pain when we broke camp at first light. The rhythm of the hike was easy to lock into. Everyone’s steps were smaller, and we stopped more frequently to savor the view. After 45 minutes, Bill announced, “We’ve just climbed Enchanted Rock.” We had climbed 450 feet, and we added another 500 in half an hour—more than a fourth of the way up already. The cool of the morning was a godsend. But I realized that somewhere along the trail I had finally acquired the aroma of goat.
Shortly before noon, the last rim came into focus. For the first time in a week, I heard the sound of an engine. We paused for lunch on a windswept mesa with a million-dollar view. A haze—which Chunel said was from fires set by dope growers preparing fields for planting—fractured the light so that I could count eighteen ridge lines from the foreground to the horizon.
When we crested the final rise, we could clearly make out Divisadero. Our crossing was official. “Un gran exito. Todos vivimos,” Skip declared as everyone shook hands. A great success. We all live. And I was the king of the world: 10,000 feet down and 10,000 feet up in six days. Not exactly Everest, but it would do. I was in better shape than ever, with quads to die for. Never mind that I smelled like a dumpster, my ankles and arms were covered with itchy bites, and my big-toe nails were black and would fall off a week later. The boots had held up.
Everyone posed for a group photograph, smiling and saying “queso.” It was another hour’s walk into town, where two Suburbans waited for us with cold beer and sodas. As if on cue, a train pulled into the station, and tourists piled out to buy trinkets and food and have a peek at the scenic overlook, which is how the vast majority of visitors actually see the canyons.
I watched one pudgy white-haired gentleman in sunglasses and bright red suspenders waddle up to the edge and peer over. “Big hole,” he said before waddling back to the train.
You can say that again.
IF YOU GO
A canyon crossing is not for everyone, but if you’re interested, you should talk to Skip McWilliams; the cost is $2,250, including two nights at McWilliams’ Sierra Lodge, meals, and transportation to and from Chihuahua City. Although I’m not likely to do a crossing again, I’d go back to Copper Canyon in a heartbeat, and take the family with me. The Sierra Lodge, thirteen miles southwest of Creel, is a stretch version of a log cabin with twenty rooms; McWilliams’ Riverside Lodge, in Batopilas, is a fanciful restored nineteenth-century hacienda with fifteen rooms (there are also Tarahumara-style sleeping quarters in a nearby cave). Both offer extended-stay packages that start at $2,250 per person per week (a second week is half-price), including meals, guide services, and transportation to and from Chihuahua City. The Sierra Lodge lacks electricity and phones (no Y2K problem here), but kerosene lanterns, portable reading lights, a tile shower with hot water, oversized towels, his-and-her robes, and a potbellied stove in each room—not to mention three-course candlelight meals with fine wines, and an open bar in the dining room—assure a certain level of comfort. The lodges are closed in June, because of the heat in Batopilas, but reopen in July, when the cooling summer monsoon rains begin. Besides taking day hikes and reading on the porch, there’s not much to do. Says McWilliams: “People who drink a lot or have health problems or who are traveling with small children are advised not to come.” For more information, call or e-mail Skip McWilliams’ Copper Canyon Lodges (800-776-3942, coppercanyon @earthlink.net) or visit the sierratrail.com Web site.
There are other accommodations in Divisadero and Creel (both four hundred miles southwest of El Paso and accessible by a paved two-lane highway) as well as in Batopilas; for information, call Columbus Travel in New Braunfels (830-885-2000). Aerolitoral has daily nonstop flights to Chihuahua City from DFW and El Paso (800-237-6639).
Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacífico, the “world’s most scenic railroad,” has first- and second-class service daily between Chihuahua City and Los Mochis, near the Pacific coast, with stops in Creel and Divisadero. The trip, which passes through 86 tunnels and crosses 37 bridges along its 418-mile route, takes about twelve hours (Columbus Travel specializes in Copper Canyon train tours).
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