the blue truck: November 2011

Remember the first part of the Barranca de Cobre blog post? This was where I was taking off the paved road, shortly after Choix. You can find it here.

Eating dust. But still, not too bad. It adds to the safety
concept having a car in front of you.

You will follow the road and you will have to use your sense of direction and your compass, respectively the picture of your GPS (the current Garmin Database for Mexico does not know the road). There are a lot of small turn-offs and you will have to be sure to stay in the general direction of North-East. Generally it is more or less the best and biggest road you’ll follow but sometimes it can become narrow and rough and you might think for a moment that you would have taken the wrong road at the last fork. If your general heading is East, North-East, you’re good. Keep going. You will pass by a couple of houses once in wile especially early after leaving the paved road. Below please find a series of Coordinates which will roughly guide you along the road in 15 to 20 minute driving increments:

N26°45.127’ W108.06.215’
N26°45.280’ W108°09.360’
N26°45.964’ W108°08.767’
N26°48.657’ W108.07.755’
N26°50.524’ W108.06.154’
N26°52.200’ W108°06.215’
N26°53.257’ W108.05.192’

At N26°54.606’ W108°02.737’ you will pass by an old mision which sits above the river and looks interesting to explore, however at the time I was there it was fenced off and there were a few buildings within the same area and I considered it to be “propriedad privado” and dropped the idea of going to have a closer look.

View down into the valley where the old missions is

From there continue for a while along the river, moving on to the village of Tubares at N26°56.456’ W107°58.846’. There is a crossroad where I was heading north towards Mesa de Arturo. There are a couple of streets in the village and it is not that difficult to find the right exit, however keep heading North, the other way out of the village is heading South-East and would bring you to San Juan de Dios and down into the Canyon towards San Ignacio and up North again towards Batopilas far down in the Canyon again. This is not the road I took. Either way it is probably best to ask in town just to confirm, since there are no signs.

There are few bridges but all the river crossings were nearly
dry and I at max had to drive through some water puddles

Laundry day

I was heading north for another couple of kilometers and at N26°59.342’ W107°57.981’ there is another crossroad. A fairly good road is leaving to the right, respectively east and would bring you to an active Gold Mine, which as I heard later in Urique is heavily guarded by armed security guys. Since this road is used by trucks as well the quality of the road improves from here on where I kept heading north. The road goes up and down and sometimes you have a spectacular view and then again you will drive inside of a smaller Canyon and will have no idea of the vastness of the entire area. At N27°00.905’ W107°59.267’ there was a road block due to construction, a piece of the road had been vanished down into the canyon.

waiting for the explosion

“Hay una explosion…” the guy with the red flag and the radio said and I had to wait about half an hour. The explosion went off and soon after a caterpillar and a grader were working their way through the freshly blown out Canyon wall. Just a couple of minutes later the Toyota was working its way through the narrow and rough new road.

sometimes the road is all good and new

I followed the road north; there are a couple of smaller areas with houses once in a while and some roads that are heading away from the “main” road. The condition of the road varies but was mostly good enough to be done with a high clearance vehicle, 4x4 is not really needed on that part, but earlier on it was, as well as through the construction site. Once you nearly reach Mesa de Arturo there is a well signed turn off South East, down into the Canyon towards the town of Urique.

View into the Canyon and on to the town of Urique

This is a very tight corner to the right, almost 180° and it will immediately start to decent, first fairly decent and then really spectacular, sometimes you feel like you are hanging in the Canyon walls. This road is nothing for long or heavy vehicles, even though there are buses going down into the canyon as well (US school bus type) but the need to take the switch backs in several attempts and when you are getting out of the Canyon again a couple of days later you will definitely appreciate having 4x4 and low gears, not to have to work your clutch too hard or overheat your auto transmission or torque converter. With any kind of dual Sport or off-road motorcycle it should be doable fairly easy, while you want to go really slow not to overshoot any of those tight corners. That would be a once in a life time experience. Since your life would end soon thereafter. This road is very spectacular, if you like driving when it gets a little more exciting than on rolling down the Interstate, you will love that stretch of road where you decent over a distance of about 30 kilometers from about 2400 meters over sea-level down to about 577 meters. Urique is a small town down in the Canyon, it has a supermarket and several smaller shops, however there is not too much above the bare necessities that you could by. There is a tire repair shop as well should you be in need of it. Here are a series of coordinates again just for verification purposes should you want to follow that road and heading down into Urique:

N27°02.822’ W107°59.441’
N27°06.488’ W107°59.843’
N27°08.792’ W108°00.645’

you don't wanna cut corners here

Most of the goods are transported in and out of the Canyon
on small pick-up trucks, most of the time the nearly indistructable
Toyotas

In Urique there is a cute campground run by some people from Oregon: Entre Amigos. The owners were not there at the time but Tomas who runs the place for them was super friendly. Once you are down in Urique you will turn left at the supermercado heading more or less north towards Guadalupe Coronado (no signs, you will have to ask or program your GPS to the coordinates) and drive all the way through town Entre Amigos is on the left hand side, pretty much at edge of town. The road is not paved abut in good condition. Entre Amigos offers quite a number of tent sites but just very few vehicle camp possibilities. Entre Amigos: N27°13.148’ W107°54.815’

Road down into Urique

Signs that it is not always that peacful in Urique

He must have pissed someone off, four flat tires in the morning

In Part III I will tell you a little about Marihuana, about when it is harvested and when it moves out of the canyon as well as why I have changed my mind and did not cross the next two mountain ranges, respectively canyons to get into Batopilas as well as the way to, and where to camp at in Creel.