Text and photos by Yvette Cardozo
Vol. 13. No. 9
Imagine riding a train along the rim of Arizona’s Grand Canyon or looking out a hotel window into a 2,000 foot chasm. Imagine a place where cliffs bend and fold into a sense of timelessness carved by wind and rain. That, basically, describes the train ride through Mexico’s Copper Canyon.
But landscape is only part of it. The culture and people are what make this adventure unique. The unique 405 mile train route winds through the Sierra Madres mountains between the Pacific coastal city of Los Mochis and Mexico’s east coast city of Chihuahua. The most colorful section, home of the Mayo and Tarahumara Indians, is between El Fuerte and Divisadero.
Before boarding the train, in the small village of Capomos, Camilla was busy making tortillas. Expertly patting corn dough or masa into flat pancakes, she tossed them into a wok shaped pan greased with lard from a beef bone. A potter was using a fiber made by mixing army ants and mud. But, it was the dancing that was so enthralling.
Years ago, Mayo warriors fought to the death with knives while tied to each other. Today, the fight is a graceful ceremonial dance accompanied by gourd drums resting in tubs of water and dried butterfly cocoons rattles. Jose Luis portrays a deer, then a mule. He kicks. He brays. He lets loose with uncannily accurate digestive sounds.
Jose and Camilla are members of the Mayo tribe, not to be confused with the Mayans. Their name is derived from the nearby Mayo River. Today they live in small towns, hunt those deer and grow squash, beans, melons, wheat and, of course, corn, and weave beautiful natural pigmented rugs.
Back at our hotel, a one-time prison converted to a home and now a picturesque inn, we learn that our room is four down from the very spot where Don Diego de la Vega … El Zorro … was born. Zorro, it turns out, really did exist. He really did rob the rich to give to the poor, though it all happened in what today is California when El Zorro was closer to fifty rather than a swashbuckling twenty years old. And yes, he did wear a mask and wield a slashing sword.
But as for the infamous “Z” supposedly carved across the landscape … The owner of our hotel shrugs with a sly smile. “¿Quien Sabe?” … who knows.
Copper Canyon is actually only one of a dozen massive canyons in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. It’s called Copper Canyon or Barranca del Cobre, not because copper is mined but because the rock walls are supposedly copper colored.
From El Fuerte, the landscape changes from corn and bean fields to rolling hills dotted with cactus and cotton plants the size of trees. After rolling across a long bridge into a longer tunnel, the track doubles back like a switchback, climbing cliffs in serpentine curves. The hills become walls of folded, bulbous sandstone falling into steep canyons plunging into boulder-strewn riverbeds. The angle gets steeper as curves get sharper. We cross long bridges from one side of the canyon to the other, ever spiraling upward.
The route includes, for those who count such things, thirty seven bridges and eighty six tunnels on our route. Completed in 1961, it took ninety years and five different companies, along with the Mexican government, to build the line. In less than one hundred and thirty miles, the rail climbs 6,700 feet.
The Copper Canyon railroad was create as a route to get inland produce to the coast for shipping. Meanwhile, the train has been hailed as the word’s most scenic railroad and is one of Mexico’s main tourist draws.
In the tourist train, the seats are first class, and the facilities, which include a dining car, are modern. including a dining car. We spend much of the trip downing tacos and Pacifico beer as the canyon flashes by.
Seven hours later and a winding journey of 134 miles, we arrived in Barrancas. Our balcony at the Posada Barrancas literally overlooked the canyon. Not to belabor a point, but picture having a hotel room on the rim of the Grand Canyon … having your balcony hang over a 2,000 foot drop.
A native family lives in a cave a short hike from our hotel. We can see them from our balcony and as we watch, a small girl runs down the trail like a gazelle, hopping from rock to rock and disappearing behind boulders before we can even catch our breath.
These people are the Tarahumara Indians, known for their astonishing speed and endurance on foot. A Colorado promoter tried bringing a few runners to ultramarathon races, those hundred mile endurance races. He gave up when the Tarahumara ran leather sandals, took cigarette breaks, and still beat professionally trained athletes.
This little settlement down the cliff actually predates the hotel, but the family doesn’t seem to mind visitors. The Tarahumara smile shyly while we take pictures. We visit another family in a huge cave near the town of Creel, again, timid but okay with visitors.
But this living situation isn’t really typical, we will find out later.
Meanwhile, nobody gets out of here without visiting the Valley of the Mushrooms, where huge boulders sit atop eroded pillars. We don’t, alas, get to the Valley of Frogs, the Valley of Breasts or our personal fav, the Valley of Erect Penises … which was recently renamed, for tourism’s benefit, the Valley of Monks.
Our last day, it finally gets real.
Most people just do the usual tourist stuff … visit the valleys, the overlooks, a couple of house-caves preserved for visitors. But if you ask, you can visit a real village. And you don’t have to hike five hours to do it.
Forty five minutes in a Hummer brings us to San Alonso, a wide spot between two canyons where two hundred people live. A corn field covers most of the valley. This is the staple food here. The people live in small adobe or wood houses with tin roofs and farm with simple hand tools and mule power.
San Alonso got electricity only in 2007. Our guide, Gustavo, has come bearing gifts … oranges, mangos, chips but also, thanks to an Australian aid organization, school books, pens, pencils, plastic scissors, combs, tooth brushes … an amazing assortment of everyday things that no one here has.
Children appear from nowhere to mob us. They gaze with huge solemn eyes … that is until the gifts come out. It’s a dozen holidays rolled into one and the kids start to giggle and laugh while trying to balance all the stuff in their tiny arms.
The men dress in modern pants and shirts but most women still wear flowing skirts in vivid colors, blankets over their shoulders and head scarves. The kids are in a mix of old and new. But many still wear huaraches, sandals of leather thongs, soled with a slice of old tire.
There is talk of serious tourist development … a commercial airport at the town of Creel, a gondola, large hotel and a fake Indian village at Divisadero.
“The contract for the resort was signed Monday,” a tourism woman told us in mid January. She said there were plans to “start building very soon,” with a scheduled completion date in mid 2010. Of course, schedules have been set and broken here before. But the contract does make it all a bit more immediate.
And there is the question of what all this will do for and to the Tarahumara. Either way, the modern world is coming. It will make life much easier for them, less picturesque for us.
We are just glad we got a chance to visit now. And “now,” most likely, will last a while longer.
If you go:
The best time to visit Copper Canyon is fall, winter or spring. Winters can be chilly with occasional snow.
It is possible to ride the train all the way from Los Mochis near the coast to Chihuahua, but the most scenic part is El Fuerte to Divisadero. And they let you stand between the cars to take pictures.