Texas Monthly

Let’s Get Lost

by Joe Nick Patoski, Photographs by Richard Speedy

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

“Want to take a walk in the woods?”

Skip McWilliams’ invitation sounded so innocuous. We were sitting in a North Dallas seafood joint last October, talking about Copper Canyon. Sprawling over 20,000 square miles of the Sierra Madre Occidental in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, Copper Canyon is actually a complex of canyons, and such a wild and wooly place, it make Arizona’s Grand Canyonn look like a theme park. If Big Bend conveys the sensation of haing fallen off the edge of the earth, Copper Canyon is the hole you fall into. Some “woods.”

Skip, who is 52, has hiked the region for eighteen years, operates two lodges in the high country – one near the town of Creel and the other in the quirky little colonial village of Batopilas in the canyon bottom – and probably knows Copper Canyon better than any gringo on earth. A day’s drive from the Texas border, the canyon is so remote that the lives of the 50,000 Tarahumara Indians who inhabit it have hardly changed since their ancesotrs retreated from the plains after the Spanish began settling the area more than three hundred yers ago. Skip would like to preserve this special place and the people who live there through ecotourism – specifically, by building a string of smaller guest houses, linked by hiking trails, that the Tarahumara would operate.

We had met in Dallas so that he could determine whether I was the right stuff for a canyon crossing, a weeklong “extreme” hike thats he organizes a couple of times a year. It’s not for evryone, Skip told me bluntly. but at 47, I felt I was in better physical shape than ever. I walk several miles a day, swim laps, and like to run rivers and creeks in an inflatable kayak. six days and five nights in Skip’s woods seemed within the realm of possibility.

A few weeks later, Skip called to try to talk me out of it. Emergency rescue was out of the question, he said.The nearest hospital was in Chihuahua City, a four-hour drive from the canyon rim. The weather was unpredictable—anything from searing heat to snow was possible. There were snakes and scorpions and bugs that biologists haven’t yet identified, including translucent assassin bugs that swell up by gorging themselves on blood. Finally, liability lawsuits weren’t part of the Mexican legal system, so if I didn’t like what I experienced, too bad. “There are no guarantees,” he warned.

I was one of six paying customers who met at Skip’s Sierra Lodge near Creel one freezing night in January. Ray and Sue McEuen, a retired couple in their late fifties from Beebe, Arkansas, had visited the canyon so often that Ray, an ex-Marine who liked to wax philosophical, was a part-time guide. Sue described herself as a repressed tomboy who was doing all the things she wasn’t supposed to do as a child in Memphis. Steve Weaver, a 53-year-old retired electronics technician from St. Petersburg, Florida, ran two Web sites dedicated to travel in Mexico, magic-bus.com and mexicotraveler.com. Broad-shouldered and bulked up, he appeared to be the most physically fit of the bunch and wore shorts just to rub it in. Richard Speedy, a 52-year-old commercial photographer from Princeton, New Jersey, had gotten hooked on Copper Canyon on his first visit three years ago and had been back four times since. Bill Appel, 48, was an electrical engineer from Austin who introduced himself as a “geek” and had warmed up for the trip by hiking in Big Bend from the desert flour into the Chisos Basin and back down again the previous weekend. I was the only first-time visitor.

Day 1—After breakfast, we met with Skip in the lodge kitchen. We needed to be flexible, he told us: “Don’t overextend yourself. Take a step and rest. Don’t take another step until you’re rest.” He warned us to watch out for dehydration: “It typically takes three hours for water to get into your stem, so if you’re thirsty, it’s already too late.” It was important to respect the Tarahumaras’ personal space, he said: “Stand at the outside of their corral. Don’t walk up to their house. That’s like standing on their bed. don’t take pictures of them or their house.” We were each issued a metal cup and spoon—our dinnerware—and then, after persuading me to leave my backup jogging shoes behind, Skip disappeared to supervise the packing of equipment.

Our expedition left the lodge shortly after one. The crew included Aine Roberts, a thirty-year-old blond gringa from California who had been guiding for Skip in Batopilas for five years but had never done a canyon cross; Chunel Olivas Parra, a tall, blue-eyed mestizo (someone of Spanish and Indian blood) from Batopilas who was our senior guide; Chunel’s 23-year-old son, Poncho, who was making hist first crossing; another mestizo guide, named Reye Ramírez; eight Tarahumara men—Antonio, Corpus, Felipe, Eliseo, Chuy, Sahuaripa, Rubén, and Chubasco—none over five feet tall, who would serve as our Sherpa guides and tend to the ten burros that would carry our gear for the first half of the journey; and three dogs from the lodge. Spanish, the second tongue for Indians and gringos alike, was the language of communication. No one but Chunel and Skip understood the Tarahumara dialect, which was unlike anything I’d heard before.

The gringos and mestizos wore hiking boots, while the Tarahumara opted for huaraches, binding their stubby feet with simple leather straps and pieces of old tires for soles. Otherwise, they looked like modern guys in their jeans and

gimme caps. Paulina and Maria, aged 19 and 25, respectively, were the expedition’s tortilla makers, and they wore multicolored layers of billowy skirsts, blouses, scarves, and shawls, traditional Tarahumara garb. Paulina, who was Chuy’s daughter and Corpus’ wife, wore cheap running shoes. Maria, the sister of Antonio, sported plastic slippers. E-skeep, el lider maximo, wore black oxfords with rubber soles and hiked hatless, his hands stuffed into the front pockets of his jeans and an Afro comb sticking out a back pocket. We gringo hikers, on the other hand, were equipped with all-weather jackets, shades, sunscreen, tents, purification tablets for our water, and Bill the Geek’s global positioning system (GPS) doodad, which would instantly tell us precisely where we were.

The expedition quickly broke up into clusters of trekkers, guides, and burros as we cleared a rise and cut across the withered remnants of a cornfield before climbing up a slope that was covered with tall pines and low piñons, all kinds of oaks, madrones, lechuguilla, yucca, and cactus, reminiscent of the high country in Big Bend and New Mexico. After little more than an hour, we reached a windswept mesa as barren and desolate as the moon, were we stopped by a primitive wooden corral with three simple log structures that could have been two hundred years old. The premises appeared to be deserted save for a few goats milling around inside the fence.

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 form 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 wok-like 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…

Day 2—We awoke to sheet of ice on the puddles by the river’s edge and a revitalizing breakfast of scrambled eggs with bacon and left-over 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 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 stady 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.

Day 3—”Yesterday was the last easy day,” Skip told me as I examined the heel of my left boot after breakfast…”

…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 abo ve, 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 own. 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…

…We continued skirting cliffs for several hours, passing sitll 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.

Day 6—I felt surprisingly little pain when we broke camp at first light. The rhythm of the hike was easy to lock into…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…

…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 by trinkets and food and have a peek at the scenic overlook, which is how the vast majority of visitors actually see the canyon.

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.

Richard Speedy, a longtime traveler to the Copper Canyon, and established photographer, took the photos for Texas Monthly. More of his beautiful photographs can be seen viewed by clicking here.