Part 1
I set off from Batopilas, at the bottom of Copper Canyon in Mexico, intent on riding my mountain bike up the 40-or-so-mile gravel road to the intersection with the paved highway connecting Creel to the Batopilas area and Guachochi. My plan was to ride it as fast as possible and break the unofficial 4-hour record. Whether or not my quest was realistic will forever remain unknown.
The entrance to a horizontal mine shaft, which we could ride our mountain bikes into, was music to our eyes. The stone opening to the Porfirio Diaz Tunnel sat solemnly and quietly on a hillside in the middle of a barrio in Batopilas, Mexico. Sure, it’d been abandoned for 70 or 80 years. But that was of no consequence to us at the current time. The entrance was circular and about 12 feet in diameter, larger than we’d envisioned. A flat dirt surface/pathway —perfect for mountain bikes —led into the darkness. Even though the place had the ominous appearance of being almost eaten by the solid rock, its persistent beckoning won us over.
I was in Mexico’s Copper Canyon leading a group of “Chavochi” adventure travelers. “Chavochi” is basically the Tarahumara word for Gringo, non-indigenous, devil people. Various things happened while we were down there in Batopilas Canyon and the town of Batopilas, which may or may not be related. I think they are.
“You’re not lost, if you don’t care where you are.”
At this point, we were some 20 miles from the last little outpost of a town we’d been through. But theoretically, at least, we were about to come to another. Jerry had the best available maps of the area loaded onto his GPS. But it only told us where we were relative to the data it was loaded with. The adage “garbage in, garbage out” came to mind, and soon after, the vision of a web page that said “no data available.”
An interesting turn of events while mountain biking some Copper Canyon singletrack.
For the longest time, Batopilas, Mexico, was connected to the small town of Cerro Colorado by just a little bit of dirt road and seven or so miles of trail, just barely wide enough for local burro traffic. Then, a few years back, that same dirt road was bulldozed all the way into that little Copper Canyon town. At that point, most of the old trail had been “improved” for vehicle use, but the last mile remained untouched, where the road took a more direct route.
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