Once we arrived in San Carlos the question was what next? We were about as far North as we wanted to go in the Sea of Cortez and we were hanging with boat friends Dawn and Rob, on SV Salt Whistle. We decided to do a land trip to the Barrancas Del Cobre.
There are tours one can sign up for but we decided to plan our own adventure. This turned out to be a couple of days sitting in front of a computer juggling train schedules, bus schedules, and making hotel reservations. In the end it, was an awesome experience.
Step one was a bus trip from San Carlos to Los Mochis in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. The bus was a nice double decker bus with feature films (in Espanol) playing. We stayed in Los Mochis overnight and got up in the morning for an early start to board El Chepe – the Chihuahua al Pacifico train which would take us from sea level to 7500 ft elevation travelling up into the Copper Canyon. The rail trip up the Copper Canyon is described as one of the 10 best rail trips in the world. The Copper Canyon is home to the Tarahumara or Raramuri people – the Running People, this was the area featured in the best selling book “Born to Run”. After a stunning train ride up the canyon we arrived at our hotel El Mirador https://hotelmirador.mx/ (The Overlook). Our balcony was perched on the rim of canyon and between the altitude and the sheer drop from the balcony it literally made you dizzy at first glance.
The next day we travelled to an adventure park nearby and rode a seven section (and two cable bridges) zip-line down to the bottom of the the tram in the canyon. I’d actually never ridden a zip-line before and this one was a pretty spectacular first ride. The Circuito de Siete Tirolesas is the longest zip-line in Latin America with ziplines from 141 to 1113m and up to 350m above the ground.
We hiked through a few of the small settlements that the Tarahumara have near the hotel and bought beautiful baskets hand-woven by the natives. Its amazing that there are still hunters/gatherers living in the canyons. The Tarahumara were a stone-age tribe only 400 years ago. They maintain strong traditions and only live near more modern towns by choice. We read in a museum that the Tarahumara still debate the choices provided by modernity over their traditional mysticism and culture.
At the bus stop at our next destination -the town of Creel in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, we met a Mexican man (Arturo) who offered to help us arrange an ATV’s tour. We took a 15 mile quad ride to some of the alpine scenery around Creel. We visited the Valley of Monks -stone formations resembling monks, and the another set of stone formations that looked like mushrooms and lizards. There was an ancient mission church and Tarahumara natives walking in their colorful dresses. The weather had turned cloudy and cool with rain showers for our quad tour and there were times we thought it might be time to turn back but we made it back before it got too cold.
Arturo also gave us a ride back to hotel Barrancas Divisador with a stop at “Fertility Rock’ (aka ‘penis rock’) for our last night in the Canyon. Hotel Barrancas Diviadero had a thriving population of stray dogs that sought to adopt us at every opportunity and were waiting at our door in the morning when we went to breakfast in a dining room perched on the edge of the cliff with 180 degree views of the canyon.
Too soon we were on the way back down the canyon on the El Chepe train and back to boat life. This time we had a haul-out scheduled to fix a valve problem on our toilet holding tank. I guess if boat life was too easy everyone would do it!
Time to pull up the anchor and head 17nm to Guaymas where they have a crane to lift Island Summers out of the water and store her in the yard while Kevin replaces both through-hulls. Hopefully, this will only take a few days.
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