copper canyon – vagando

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.

Parque Nacional de Las Barrancas del Cobre

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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Surviving the Sierra

The mountains outside Buenaventura, Chihuahua, Mexico to Santa Ana Bavìcora, Chihuahua, Mexico

We are up before the sun eating oranges outside the barbed wire fence. The sun rises down canyon, giving everything a tangerine glow. We start riding. I never even try to move any faster than 10km/hr, as the next hour clearly visible as it sinuously traverses the mountainside climbing deep into the Sierra Madre. We pass a small pasture illuminated in the morning light, a grey coyote stands alert as we pass. Traffic is light and polite. Every car gives us a wide berth, a wave and often a well intentioned honk that makes me tense every time. We take one break midway, eating fruit flavored with sweat dripping down my face. We march upwards and meander back and forth as we reach the summit adorned with shrines dedicated to the Virgin de Guadalupe, each one filled with half burnt candles and dead flowers. My gnawing hunger makes itself known and we start our descent into Ignacio Zaragoza.

I lean my bike into the turns, yipping and howling as junipers and piñons fly past. It never lasts long though, the gradient falls off and we find ourselves using our pedals once again to traverse an open valley full of waving brown grass populated by corpulent cattle. We navigate the dirt streets of Zaragoza in search of food with no luck. We are directed further down the road, where we gorge ourselves on chips, salsa, guacamole, burritos and huevos Mexicanos. The restaurant is strange, full of patrons, yet nobody speaks. I try to break the silence to no avail. This is our first taste of the different constitution of the denizens of the sierra.

As we leave town we climb continuously and are frequently taunted by short descents. Overeating was a bad choice; I stare enviously at open patches of grass on the roadside and imagine myself laying there contented. The valley stretches out in front of us, divided by painstakingly built stone fences. I pull over to stop and stretch. Brin and I talk briefly as we watch two donkeys that overheard our conversation from a distance come tear assing down the hillside right up to the fence that separates us. Brin draws them close with a climb of grass held out as an olive branch. As I run my hand down their muzzles, dust fills the air.

We frequently stop to ask for directions and about the terrain. We peruse chiles, discuss them and buy large quantities. We stock up on supplies before arriving at the pass between this valley and Santa Ana Bavìcora. The descent is incredible, a road crew yips and hollers as we pass, straight out of a narcocorrido. As the wind howls in my ears, the pines give way to rock, scrub and cactus once more. As we relax in the sumptuous plaza of Santa Ana Bavìcora, centered around a fountain surrounded by roses, a toothless man stares at our map uncomprehending before sending us on a shorter route towards Matachic that doesn’t exist according to our map.

We head out of town in search of a campsite, apple orchards line the roadside. We find one that lacks a fence and wait for traffic to pass before we disappear into the rows. A man in a pickup nearly slows to a stop as he rolls past staring. Strange. We roll our bikes across the supple dirt and eat apples off the trees left behind from the harvest. We unpack and get prepared for the night as a man whistling and eating an apple passes through our row, only long enough for us to make eye contact. He heads onward, but it unnerves us slightly. Trucks wander through the fields and machinery scours the earth late into the night. Traffic roars past. Light pierces the trees and shines on my face, leaves fall around me. A dog bays in the distance. All of this rattles me for a moment, but you either accept your limited locus of control or spend your life worrying about things that are outside of it. I accept that I am at the mercy of the world and roll onto my side to go to sleep.

Santa Ana Bavìcora, Chihuahua, Mexico to Guerrero, Chihuahua, Mexico

I awake to a sleeping back covered in frost. Light from the sun dapples the ground around me. As we slowly begin our morning, I look down the row of trees to see a man standing 100 meters away watching us. He disappears before returning several minutes later. I can see him talking on his cell phone. He disappears again and we start quickly rolling our bikes out of the orchard. We are still in the relative security of the trees as a cop car comes flying around the corner in a plume of dust heading in the direction of the farm house. We quickly hop onto our bikes and pedal hard down the road.

We set off in the chilly air towards Matachic. The kilometers come easy until a small town appears on the right side of the road where we decide to stop for breakfast before we climb. Buena Vista has rutted rocky streets dotted with adobe houses and unintimidating dogs as obstacles. A man in a stained Frank Zappa shirt scratches his belly as he gives us directions to the local store. The massive store has shelves lined with goods spaced several feet apart, a meagre selection. We buy small candy bars as a consolation for the shopkeep.

As we are trying to find our way out of town, I ask wiry man in a cowboy hat picking up trash in his yard about the way out of town. He comes over smiling, speaking a mile a minute in Spanish.

‘Where are you from?’
‘Colorado. Have you been to the States?’ We agreed on a joint answer to simplify our lives.
‘I worked in Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Arizona.. All over the West. Maybe half of the townspeople here have been to the States to work. We work hard and cause very few problems. I had my papers when I was there and worked in construction for many years.’
‘Are you going to go back?’
‘No, I have earned enough money and learned enough skills that I don’t need to go back there. I like living here more.’
‘Can you find work here?’
‘If you know what you are doing, there is construction work here. The problem with immigration is that the immigrants aren’t brought into the system and families are split apart. Many of the hard working Mexicans are deported while the lazy criminals who don’t even have jobs go unnoticed.’
’What do you think should be done to fix the problem?’
‘I don’t know. Obama has four more years to fix it.’
‘Did Obama win the election?’
‘Yeah, he won, by quite a bit. He has a tough job fixing all of the problems that Bush created, worrying about all of the money he spent.’

This is how we find out that Obama won the presidency.

‘Romney is a pendejo’ I feel like freely expressing my opinion.
‘No, no. He isn’t a bad person. He is just a part of a group that has bad policies.’

I am taken aback by this intelligent understanding view.

‘What do you think about Peña Nieto winning the election?’

This question always evokes interesting answers, as most people believe the election was rigged in typical Mexican fashion. The PRI is the establishment party of Mexico that held sway over the government for over 60 consecutive years until the conservative Northern party, PAN, inexplicably took the reins in 2000. PAN held the presidency for 12 years until January 2013.

‘PRI is full of crooks. We need a change, we need to move away from that style of politics. Politicians are like babies diapers, you need to change them frequently. But in many cases Mexicans don’t value the right things and they get the politicians that they deserve.’’

We introduce ourselves and learn that his name is Beto. He shows us pictures of his family on his cell phone.

‘We are going to find some breakfast, it was really nice talking to you Beto’ I say in Spanish.
‘You are going to find ham and eggs!’ Beto shouts in English as we ride away.

Our day is off to an interesting yet slow start as we climb back into the piñons and junipers. As we descent into Matachic we crouch close to our bikes and pedal hard to set new high speed records on the steep rolling descents. We ride up to a cop car parked in the middle of the intersection of two highways to ask where we can find some food. The windows are cracked, both seats are reclined and the passengers are sleeping.

‘Haha. They are sleeping!’ Brin exclaims as he rides up.
‘No…no…no’ We hear come from the car as the seats rachet up.

I ride over and they button up their shirts and put on their hats before rolling down the window to talk with us. We get directions and are told to tell anyone in town that we are friends of Mario if they give us trouble. Matachic is a strange place, random drunks staggering in the streets shout broken English as we ride past and one gropes our arms as we walk into a restaurant. Every town here seems to have its own vibe, the one here is unpleasant.

After Matachic we enter a section of rolling hills that never seem to end and sap our energy. The wind picks up, further demoralizing us. We keep pushing though. As we pedal into Guerrero I smell chicken roasting over flames and start riding towards it. I lose the scent and double back until I see it, El Pollo Rey. We lean our bikes against the wall and treat ourselves to a beer and an entire chicken.

A man enters with his alligator skin boots clomping and says nothing in response to our greetings, only flipping up his shirt so that we can see the pistol in his waistband. A black cowboy hat and thick mustache complete the look. He glares at Brin the entire time we sit there, I have my back to him. We decide to hasten our departure.

Outside town we find ourselves passing our gear over a barbed wire fence once more to a spot nestled in the pines with a beautiful view of the sun setting over the sierra. The pink lingering in the sky until darkness overtakes us. The riding here is spectacular, open, minimal traffic, good people and a constantly varying landscape.

Guerrero, Chihuahua, Mexico to Creel, Chihuahua, Mexico

The big push. We each eat a can of tuna, a banana that tastes like drywall and several chocolate cookies. I know the taste of drywall from a strange childhood that I have expounded upon previously. The morning is chilly and already a steady breeze buffets our advance. We ride across a large plain filled with apple trees and alfalfa fields before arriving at Entronque San Pedro, a place where I spent many hours sticking my thumb out the year before.

Creel is in our sights: relaxation, food and beer. The plains quickly give way to the sierra, we drop into canyons and climb out, over and over. We reach a river canyon that softens our ascent, but it funnels wind that leaves us absolutely gasping for air. We alternate drafting every couple of minutes as leading into the stiff wind is exhausting. I pedal as hard as I can to reach the top of several climbs, the pine trees on either side swaying from top to bottom. We stop and collapse into the dirt on the side of the road, laying in silence before eating some peanuts and cookies.

I grit my teeth and curse under my breath as I give everything that I have until we reach the bottom of a steep 400m climb. The wind strangely dies and we leisurely climb to the summit where a steep downhill awaits us. I am reveling in the descent, lost in a joy that nothing else I have ever done has come close to providing when a truck coming the opposite direction lays on its horn. A piece of lumber comes flying off of the truck as my eyes are watering at 60km/hr. I instinctively swerve and narrowly miss the piece of wood, but I pull over to the side of the road to breath deeply for a few seconds. Too close.

‘Everything alright?’ Brin shouts as he rolls past.
‘Yep!’

We pass through San Juanito, a rough logging and drug trafficking town. The streets are lined with liquor stores, indolent women of ill repute and corrupt police. A strange mix of Norteños and indigenous people becomes apparent for the first time in our trip. We ask around town about the ride to Creel and receive answers that vary wildly in typical Mexican fashion.

‘O Si. Tan fàcil, muy fàcil. Ustedes han hecho el parte mas difícil.’
‘Hay dos subidas grandes, mas grande que la subida para llegar acà.’
‘Solamente hay una subida grandote!’

We eat some burritos that a guy is selling out of the back of his van and pay someone else as the guy who sold them to us took off running as we were eating for no clear reason. A bus runs us off the road, we yell unheard obscenities. Logging trucks slowly pass and choke us with black smoke. One logging truck comes down a climb we are slowly ascending, making itself first heard by a horrific squealing, swerving recklessly between both lanes at over double the speed limit. We bail to the side of the road again. Another truck randomly decides to pass another coming uphill as we are full of momentum going downhill, Brin bails into the gravel and I am forced into a steep concrete ditch on the side of the road. The riding is anything but mundane, complete focus is necessary. Virgin de Guadalupes line the roadside in little shrines. Drivers urge us on. At the summit a woman crosses herself in her car, Brin thinks that she is blowing him a kiss.

We hit Creel at full speed from a downhill, coming into town like madmen. I fly over speedbumps, blow past grandmas, a fat kid runs out into the street and reaches his arm out to touch me as I pass, but I am too fast. We gulp down beer as quickly as the waitress can bring it. The early darkness and chill put us to sleep 643km from Columbus, New Mexico.

All paths lead nowhere, but some make for a joyous journey and others for a miserable one.

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