The Legend of the Pura Bajada

Creel, Chihuahua, Mexico to Samachique, Chihuahua, Mexico

We now live in a society where the hour of the clock is more important than the position of the sun. We live by set schedules that do not correspond to the natural world and thus we shift our clocks forward an hour in the beginning of summer and back an hour in the fall. One day in the spring ends up being 23 hours and one in the fall is 25 hours. Not only am I pissed off about the switch in time, I have to be pissed off for an extra hour.

As we shift an hour back it makes already short days more difficult as restaurants and shops open later relative to the rising of the sun. The hour of the day is irrelevant to us. We are delayed in accomplishing certain vital tasks such as returning 1.2L beer bottles to the grocery store and buying fruit. As we ride out of town my leg feels slightly better after a break, although I nurse it anyways.

As we exit Creel we enter the indigenous ejidos that are minimally developed and still maintain large stands of pine. The indigenous people subsistence farm in this area and live a life very distinct from that of other Mexicans. They walk the road, appearing and disappearing into the woods, as the only traffic we encounter for awhile. One scraggly old man herds goats on the roadside, the tinkling of the bells fills the air. We greet everyone as we pass in Spanish, their second language, which receives a lukewarm reception. I feel like Cortez on his iron horse, so I stop speaking and just give gentle waves

The riding is stunning, lined with pines and limestone outcroppings. The road is not cut through the landscape and instead follows the meandering contours that characterize the sierra. It is difficult to tell where we are going in such a steep landscape as there are virtually no vistas. We could be going up, down, sideways or topwise. We were told by every person with whom we spoke that this section promises to be arduous. After a sheer descent we follow a river canyon lined with fences
around pastures and cornfields made of meticulously stacked rocks. The homes a similarly built out of the materials available, pine and stone. We ride over Río Uríque and climb for hours at 8km/hr, unsure of where the summit lies. The air gets cooler, the trees change. We need food and water in Samachique. We arrive where Samachique should lie according to our piece of shit map and find out that it is several kilometers off the highway and a decent descent in order to get supplies.

Unnecessary climbing? No huey. Instead, we choose to buy several liters of water, four baloney and cheese sandwiches on white bread and two cans of juice from a lady in a shack on the side of the road. We continue climbing despite sheer exhaustion.

The shadow I cast on the road grows long. I arrive at the top of a climb where the cold air prickles the sweat on my skin and look out upon the mountains in the distance. A summit of some sort. We disappear into the woods, feeling secluded and secure. We get quiet as an entire indigenous family passes through the woods, not 20 meters away, without noticing us. You are never very isolated in Mexico.

We build a fire out of pine trees downed from the routing of power lines through the area. The flames ebb and surge as we take in the stars. An owl hoots in the distance.

Samachique, Chihuahua, Mexico to just outside Guachochi,Chihuahua, Mexico

I am more rigid than normal when I get up, the cold making matters worse. We are out of food. We descend and climb for kilometers, riding the crest of the sierra. The roadside is littered with broken Barrelito beer bottles that I am constantly dodging. We pass a frozen lake in a meadow.

We eventually reach a small store where children who are in school are practicing marching in step on the basketball court in the freezing air. Brin tries to enter the store and a woman emerges from the house next door and approaches us with a look on her face like he just spit in her salsa. The people in the sierra are genuinely good people, but they are just not very outwardly welcoming. The lady opens the store and then just stares at us, occasionally giving monosyllabic answers. Another woman arrives to help stare at us. Nobody here has water. We buy tuna and cookies for breakfast. We devour the food as the school kids stare through the cyclone fence. One girl keeps poking her head around the corner of a building and disappearing shyly if we look at her.

Exhausted we arrive in another small town where we buy avocados and tortillas. We sit on some pine needles in the forest and relish our quarry. I limp into Guachochi where we split a chicken and a rack of ribs.

We spend most of our days building a mental roadmap of what lies ahead based upon hearsay, myths and talltales. On this map there is never much climbing with plenty of towns where we can get supplies followed by a lengthy downhill. Pura bajada is the phrase oft used, meaning pure descent. People who have never ridden a loaded bicycle significant distances have a limited ability to judge the landscape and appreciate its features; riding a bicycle sears the topography into your head. That being said, I prefer lies.

Guachochi is a decent logging town with a massive golden bighorn sheep that demarcates the entrance to town, an animal that does not live in this area. It may have lived here at one point, but would have been hunted to extinction hundreds of year ago like everything else in Mexico. There is virtually no animal life here except vultures. The state’s namesake dog is strangely popular here, they brazenly bark from rooftops and curbs as we pass.

We ride outside of town, making a few extra kilometers as the day peters out. Camp is on a limestone slab a hundred meters off the road where we build an awesome fire. I read until I fall asleep, only to be awoken by the sound of my heart beating in my sleeping bag, which sounds like footsteps and Brin talking in his sleep. All I can make out is ‘pura bajada.’

Outside Guachochi, Chihuahua, Mexico to 40km outside of Balleza, Chihuahua, Mexico

The fire still smolders and fills the air with the sweet smell of burnt Juniper. The sun never officially rises, it is smothered by a curtain of clouds. We set out in search of the legend of the Pura Bajada. Dozens of people have told us that it exists, the cyclist’s El Dorado. It can drive a man mad. It never appears for several hours as we grind our way upwards only to dissipate our potential energy in seconds over and over again.

I limp to the top of a climb drenched in sweat. Brin arrived a while before and sits around chatting with a road crew.

‘¡Ay quiero vender la pinche bici y comprar una mota!’ I exclaim as I lay my bike down.

This has them in stitches. It takes me a second to realize what I said. La moto is short for la motocicleta. La mota is short for marijuana. This roughly translates to ‘Ah I want to sell my fucking bike and buy weed.’ They courteosly offer to get me high, but I decline.

A few of the construction workers wear neon vests that are very similar to the one that I bought to wear while riding, but have never donned until this point. I put it on proudly.

‘¡Dame una pala!’ I shout and they toss me a shovel.

I deliriously shovel gravel as fast as I can, keeping them laughing.

We are once again given a scintillating vision of the Pura Bajada from the road workers, yet we curse them as we continue climbing. The mountains begin to gradually soften. We arrive in Baquiriachi on empty stomachs. A cowboy in a pink on black jacket embroidered with Japanimation samurais fighting directs us to a 75 year old lady’s house where we can feast. She invites us in and is very reserved initially. She claps her hands together to make tortillas out of corn that she places on her woodburning stove, churning out a stack in just a few minutes. She begins talking to us about the Sierra Tarahumara and her life here. She eats only tortillas, beans and pinole.

‘What is pinole?’ Brin asks.

‘It is toasted corn that is ground. It is what the Tarahumara runners drink. Do you want some?’

I savor the pinole while she speaks of Pura Bajada that awaits us.

We continue climbing a little more before suddenly an expansive desert valley lined by craggy cliffs opens up in front of us, the sierra dropping off. Juquilita’s Mustache! Malverde’s Tiara! The legends are true!

We do a quick pre-descent check to make sure that nothing is going to let loose at 60km/hr and go. I veer across both lanes, banking into turns. I hit 69.9km/hr without pedaling on one section. The views are stunning and I nearly lose control as I get distracted. Cactus appear in the blur. Mormon crickets again crunch under my tires and ping against my spokes. Cattle lift their heads and gaze as we pass. The likelihood of Onza attacks diminishes with each passing second.

We arrive in Balleza where ⅕ of the population appears to be crosseyed from our limited sample size. We buy the following provisions: Honey, bacon, fresh caramel and beans. We head out of town into a muted landscape, the horrors of the Sierra fading from my mind in the warm desert air.

The past few days have been without a doubt the toughest mentally and physically in my life, mainly due the pain in my leg and exhaustion that never abated during our break in Creel. I went to bed the past few nights knowing that I would wake up stiff and in pain, only to fight through it over the day as I vomit stomach acid into my mouth from the 800mg of Ibuprofen that I am eating on a stomach that is not nearly full enough. I have sores on my ass that burn everytime I sit down.

Before a climb we stop for some tacos from a pudgy roadside taco vendor. Brin talks to him and they stumble through a conversation in Spanish until the man switches to perfect English. He has lived in America for the past 20 years as his parents brought him there when he was a child. He went to school, got married, bought two houses and had a kid in America. He remembers nothing from being a child in Mexico, yet was deported last year and has had to start a life here. He hopes that Obama will give him and his parents, who still reside in America illegally, amnesty.

‘A lot of the drugs that come from the sierra pass through here, El Tule. The narcos will get out of their cars with assault rifles and eat tacos before leaving a good tip. They mind their own business. There was a guy full of bullet holes in the bushes over there a few weeks ago, but he was probably mixed up with the wrong people.’

His son cracks all of us up by running around in miniature cowboy boots and kicking trash while shouting all of the phrases he knows in English.

At the summit we pass all of our gear over a barbed wire fence, but the ground is uneven and littered with Cat’s Claw and cactus. We carry our gear and our bikes all the way to the summit where the ground is flat and the cattle have cleared out most of the prickly plants. I gently slide cow patties a few feet away from where I will sleep. The sky is filled with a thin sheared sheet of clouds the underside of which is on fire against a faded Robin’s egg sky. Shooting stars cut cut across the Milky Way as cows bellow in the distance.

I stretch in the starlight before laying down for the night. I feel like today was the first time I felt that I might actually make it to Mexico City, the only destination that I have. I listen to the coyotes yipping and howling in the distance, they know something about living that we never can. To be free with no future or past. They curl up with the rising of the sun and set out as darkness descends with a purpose. I keep trying to push myself in order to find my limits. I have never actually known a point where I can no longer continue in my life.

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