(Nov 17 – Nov 18, 2017)
After leaving Creel, we camped for a night at Lake Arareko, visited interesting rock formations, and hiked into a nice waterfall, then made our way to the town of Batopilas in the bottom of the Copper Canyon. We had been told that the road was paved, but was steep, and scattered with rock and debris. The first part of the 65 kilometre drive seemed pretty relaxed, we saw a few rocks and thought “Hey, this isn’t so bad”.
(Nov 15 – 16, 2017)
Prior to coming to Creel we had booked an overnight tour with Eco AlterNATIVE Tours. We were not sure what to expect from the tour, we just knew that we would be visiting a village of the Raramuri people.
We looked at the map and made a rough estimate of the distance from Tonichi to Basaseachic Falls. It looked like maybe 175 km. Nice easy day. A little way down the road when we got phone coverage, Google Maps said it was 250km and would take 4.5 or so hours….what?
We wanted to make our way towards the Barranco del Cobre (Copper Canyon) and we knew we wanted to spend a night at Basaseachic Falls along the way, but we were pretty sure we could not make it there in one day. We looked at our map and decided on a route that would take us on some lesser travelled road. We had some concern that the one road might be not much more than a track, but decided we would assess it when we got there and if it looked bad we would take a detour that would add a few kilometres to the day but allow us to travel on better roads. We didn’t know where we would camp that night, but hoped we might find a nice place to park along a river.
We left Sunnyvale near San Francisco and made our way into Arizona, heading for the border crossing at Nogales (south of Tucson). Before leaving California we spent another night in a casino parking lot just west of Palm Springs. We woke up at 3 in the morning to the sound of helicopters flying overhead. In the morning we discovered that there were several police cars, authorities armed with HUGE rifles, ambulances and other emergency equipment blocking off part of the casino….what the ….. ?????? Okay, looks like some action happening, but can we still use the rest room????