Friday, October 17, 2008

Waterfalls and Canyons

It’s Thursday (Oct 16), and we’re in Creel at the Copper Canyon. Getting there, we drove from Caborca almost all the way back to Arizona just to finally pick up our car permit (that’s a longer story; more about that later, maybe...). We made it to Agua Prieta (still almost in the US), where we found a hotel with wireless internet from where we did the last post.
Finally, we’re headed south to Casas Grandes, thinking we had out-flanked the effects of hurricane Norbert. We visited the ruins of an 800-year old trading post built by the Paquime people. This tribe skillfully built “big houses” (casas grandes) from mud walls reinforced with gravel, a technique still used today to make mud bricks. The Metates campground, a grassy back yard with hookups, at the north end of Nuevo Casas Grandes was quite pleasant, and we were the only ones there.
Yesterday was a beautiful drive to Basaseachi National Park, whose main attraction is the 800-foot high waterfall. To get there, we drove from N. Casas Grandes to Buenaventura, and took good paved secondary roads south, which lead through beautiful open grassland country with ubiquitous slope-soaring potential, so long as you don’t mind abandoning your car along the highway and taking long strenuous hikes. The highway follows the valleys, and there are no roads up the hills, not even bad ones.
When we reached the primary highway toward Hermosillo, we had only about 60 miles to go to the National Park and thought it was going to be an easy cruise. Reality: after over two hours of narrow, windy, steep, non-stop-curvy road, we finally reached the town of Basaseachi, where we stocked up on drinking water and fresh fruit and hand-made tortillas.
It was now late enough to delay a trip to the falls for the next day. So we checked into a place called Rincón, which rents cabins in a beautiful setting, but also happens to have some parking for small RVs.
The waterfall itself is spectacular: the water free-falls for over 800 feet year-round! Very impressive is the labor of love spent on hand-building a beautiful walking trail to the lip and the bottom of the falls. It’ll take a little while yet to finish, but it and other related development will make this area an even more worthwhile place to visit.

2 comments:

luis fernando said...

los extraño

Marcela and Dieter, ShredAir said...

Hola Luis Fernando,

Envianos un mensaje al correo electronico: info@shredair.com
y nos mantenemos en contacto.

Lo mas memorable de este recorrido ha sido todas las personas con las que hemos tenido la oportunidad de compartirlo. Los invitamos a mantenernos en contacto via correo electronico: info@shredair.com

Marcela y Dieter