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Trekking
Personalized trekking excursions, with Adrian Jimenez an expert bilingual and experienced certified guide. The only licensed guide in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico recognized by the federal government.
We offer anything from a mild walking day tour to a full 7 day trekking excursion into the canyons. Whether you are trekking for the views or for the exotic birds, you will be amazed with the sites. We will arrange for everything including the transportation and preparation of all your camp side meals.
Our expert guide Adrian Jimenez will be happy to design the right tour for you and your group, taking into consideration the physical level and trekking experience of the participants.
Trekking Copper Canyon
A maze of gorges more complex than the Grand Canyon is a last refuge for both trogons and the Tarahumara.
By Ted Kerasote
Ears popping and hiking poles scraping for purchase, I dropped into the Cañon de Cusárare on a steep trail that switchbacks through ponderosa and Apache pines, juniper, agave, and yucca, down through the songs of canyon wrens, and beneath the low-level sweep of a turkey vulture, red head cocked and appraising, as if I might slip and become a meal.
The wind, desiccated from its passage over the Chihuahuan Desert, faded to a faraway hum on the rim above, a reminder of the world I was leaving. The burros placed their small hooves with deliberation, dislodging stones that tinkled over the cliffs and disappeared into the shadows below.
Downstream lay ancient times: the labyrinth of Mexico's Copper Canyons, 5,000 square miles of mesas, buttes, and serpentine ravines deeper and more complex than the Grand Canyon. Las Barrancas del Cobre, literally "the Gorges of Copper," are home to several species of trogons, parrotlike birds with emerald backs and mango-colored bellies that I had wished to see for years. Now I was getting close.
The Copper Canyons region is also home to the Tarahumara people, who live in the canyons, sometimes in cliff dwellings. The Tarahumara have developed superb running skills because of the terrain they inhabit. One day I saw two young girls chasing a herd of goats up a defile, leaping up extremely steep terrain as fast as their goats. Another time I saw a man running headlong down a mountainside. In 1993 three Tarahumara men entered the Leadville Trail 100, a 100-mile endurance race through the mountains of Colorado at elevations as high as 12,600 feet. The three, all of them running in sandals made of old automobile tires, finished first (20 hours, 2 minutes, 33 seconds), second, and fifth in a field of 295. The winner, Victoriano Churro, was 55 years old and a grandfather.
Accompanied by several Tarahumara porters, I was taking a week to cross the canyons, emerging, I hoped, at Divisadero, where the Chihuahua-Pacific Railway stops and gives passengers their one long view into the abyss. Skip McWilliams, the leader of our trek and the owner of Copper Canyon Hiking Lodges, reminded me to use the word hope when referring to our wild crossing, because, as he explained, our success was contingent upon finding water (the area has been through eight years of drought), the fitness of our group (people had blown out knees on previous crossings), and the vicissitudes of snakebite, scorpion sting, and landslide.
McWilliams, a Michigan businessman who has traveled in Mexico for most of his 53 years, bears a striking resemblance to the actor Jack Nicholson, both in his physical appearance and in his ironic sense of humor. He had us sign a release form that read like the warning labels on toxic substances. His legal hedges only whetted our appetites, especially the lines "There is no possibility of helicopter evacuation. This is a journey into the past."
In the late afternoon, after a five-hour hike during which we stopped often to watch birds and admire the vistas, we reached the Río Cusárare, chalky stones scattered across its turquoise shallows. Holding the last sunlight, pinnacles serrated the canyon walls high above us. We pitched our tents on a sandy beach and walked upstream to several hot springs. With trail-weary groans, we sank into the 104-degree water. Our group included Bill Josulin and Lisa Schell, a wildlife biologist and a plant ecologist from Colorado; John Moeny, another wildlife biologist, from Utah; Becki and Keith Helmstetler, an account planner and an architect from North Carolina; and me, a writer from Wyoming. We were all in Mexico for the stunning views, challenging hiking, exotic plants, and new birds. We had also journeyed south, we conceded, for the disconnection, the peace that one slips into after days of walking with no diversions except eating and sleeping.
The sunlight squeezed from the top of the canyon. We returned to camp and found Jésus Olivas, McWilliams's rangy 70-year-old head guide, basting chicken in a giant pan. On the other side of the fire, Paula Batista, a small, shy woman, made tortillas. The burros grazed across the river, and our Tarahumara porters lounged against a charred log, drinking coffee. Muy contento.
We hiked east to west, and, since the canyons run north to south, the days took on an oscillating rhythm as we crossed the grain of the land. We rose at dawn for chorizo and coffee, then followed the last of the cool evening air, still sinking into the canyon. Soon the sun reached us, and like raptors we climbed the ascending thermals to a ridgetop, strolling along its crest, the oak leaves thick underfoot and, where dust covered the trail, deer and puma tracks telling the story of the night's hunting. In the late afternoon, above the protective walls of the canyon and back on the airy skin of the planet, we reached an overlook.
Canyon after ridge after defile receded to a sky corrugated by buttes. It was surely one of the better vistas on the planet, combining the dizzy relief of Himalayan valleys and the spare dignity of Utah's canyon country. If someone had taken a step off the rim, he wouldn't have touched rock more than once before hitting water 3,600 feet below. Fields of corn and beans terraced the gentler land above the sheer stone walls, and trails meandered from small huts, vanishing into forests of pine and oak, only to emerge at great distances, revealing the extent of the foot-powered civilization that still exists in this corner of northwestern Mexico.
McWilliams had promised that the views would get better as the trip progressed and that the hiking would get more difficult. He hadn't exaggerated. The next day the burros were replaced by six Tarahumara porters, who could manage the 4,000-foot descent to the Barranca San Ignacio on an improbable boulder-strewn trail cut into the side of the gorge. At times we downclimbed short sections of rock on which a burro would have needed wings. Once, as I rounded a bend, I spied several petroglyphs on the wall above me--stylized red figures with ornate headdresses and outstretched arms. Among them, an upside-down human form, mouth open in a scream, plummeted to his death.
It was a graphic reminder to pay attention to my footing, but it was difficult to keep my eyes on the trail. Everywhere, I spotted birds I had never seen before: yellow-eyed juncos, rufous-crowned sparrows, Bewick's wrens, hooded orioles, berylline hummingbirds, and acorn woodpeckers. But no trogon.
Because of its geographic location, the Copper Canyons region collects U.S. and Canadian overwintering species, migrants from the desert Southwest, and tropical Central American species. In addition, it is home to perhaps two dozen Mexican endemics. All told, several hundred bird species occur in the area in the course of a year. The region's mammals include deer and mountain lions, and there is a variety of snakes, scorpions, and butterflies.
We reached the canyon floor shortly before dusk. House-size boulders, borne by what must have been cataclysmic floods, afforded us cozy nooks in which to pitch our tents. Sycamores spread overhead protectively, and I had the sudden feeling of having arrived at the very bottom of the world, the sky a jagged distant seam between the two canyon rims. Lisa and John went upstream to visit a waterfall. Bill, Keith, Becki, and I strolled in the opposite direction, bathing in a hot pool while a vermilion flycatcher and a magnificent hummingbird zipped above us. I returned to camp first, but I had no more than put my water bottles in my tent when Bill, the other avid birder in our group, rushed up, sweat dripping from his beard. "Come quick," he panted. "There's a trogon."
I followed him downstream and helped him search the ceiba forest on the steep canyonside. Turning away in frustration, he said, "He was here." I continued to scan the trees hung with pods of kapok as the light, and my hopes, grew dim. Then Bill whispered, "Look up."
Among the heavy green leaves almost directly above us, I saw an eared trogon: 14 inches long, darker emerald than the foliage, his belly rosy and glowing against the graying sky. Serene, he cocked his head at us, as if he were the feathered distillate of this remote and quiet place.
The days spun on as we moved west, tracing six-foot-wide ledges where cliff dwellings perched like aeries. Once, as I passed the slats of a door, the smiling eyes of a Tarahumara child peered at me. "¡Hola!" I said, and quick as a lizard her eyes vanished.
On a rest day, Skip, Becki, Keith, and I explored downstream on the Río Rurahuachi and were soon stopped by an impassable drop, the stream, shrunk by the dry season, pouring smoothly over the rimrock and spraying into an azure pool 50 feet below us. Sitting on the apron of stone, we watched two black phoebes prancing on the shoreline boulders and a yellow-bellied sapsucker hammering the bole of a tree. Skip suddenly pointed to a coppery flash downstream. A bird had come to rest in an oak. We raised our binoculars and found an elegant trogon, which has a bronze-colored tail. We gazed at it for many minutes as it fed and called and fluttered, the river purling by our feet. When the bird flew away, McWilliams turned to me and said, "So, can you imagine a hotel and a road down here?"
He didn't have to say more. We had discussed the development slated for the canyon where we were camped, part of a 12-year, $500 million plan that Fondo Nacional de Fomento de Turismo (FONATUR), Mexico's federal tourism-development agency, has aimed at the Copper Canyons region. Offering travelers a different experience from Mexico's glitzy ocean resorts, FONATUR hopes, in the words of its master plan, "to benefit the indigenous population through its active involvement in sustainable economic regional development."
The next morning, I hiked ahead of the group and reached the canyon rim while the air was still cool. Standing on a promontory, I visually retraced our route: six days of hiking, more up and down than across. We suffered no snakebites or scorpion stings, though we saw snakes on the trail and scorpions around our camps. Plus, I lengthened my life list, adding two trogon species.
Just as important, though, was what we didn't see and didn't hear. My eyes rested on the tawny ridges, stretching one after the other to the horizon. My ears still hummed with nothing but shimmering air. I turned and walked up to Divisadero, where the street vendors squatted by the hotels, hawking baskets and burritos as vans, pickup trucks, and motor homes rolled by.
Ted Kerasote has written extensively about the development pressures that are threatening wild places.
Sidebar
Cancún or National Park?
In the United States, the Copper Canyons would have been designated a national park long ago. Instead, FONATUR, Mexico's federal tourism-development agency, has a $500 million plan to develop the area as an ecotourism resort. "We're not talking Cancún here," insists Alejandra Villalobos, the head of the planning department for the state of Chihuahua's Department of Tourism. "We want to make this as low-impact as possible, and include the Tarahumara in all the important decisions." The Tarahumara could undoubtedly benefit from increased tourism, but they have retreated farther and farther from civilization, moving deeper into the canyons. (One indication of their feelings about development is that they asked Skip McWilliams, who leads treks in the region, to bring only four groups to their area a year.)
Low-impact, like sustainable development, has broad interpretations. In Creel, the gateway town to the Copper Canyons, rustic log architecture is giving way to boxy cement and plate-glass hotels, and a KOA campground and Best Western motel sprawl on the valley floor.
When I visited Creel last February, a daily ration of water was being brought in by tanker truck. Now thousands of hotel beds are being considered for this region of very seasonal water. A proposed solution? Drain local hot springs, one of the area's finer scenic attractions.
For the time being, at least, steepness and remoteness protect most of the canyons. Sadly, FONATUR continues to equate such empty wildness and lack of amenities with poverty, illiteracy, and ill health, ignoring how other nations, notably Nepal, have managed to turn similarly inaccessible landscapes into assets.
The 60,000 Tarahumara who inhabit the Copper Canyons could profit from development, but it would have to be done right. Modern hotels and RV campgrounds could be confined to already-developed areas of Creel and Divisadero, keeping structures away from the rim so they're not visible from below. With roads prohibited in the canyons proper, and hiking tourists lured into their depths, the Tarahumara would achieve one of the key ingredients for maintaining cultural identity--an intact homeland with the potential to generate revenue. --T.K.
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