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Outside Magazine Septmeber 2000

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Drop Dead Gorges
Pancho Villa lives! Viva high adventure down in Mexico's Copper Canyon.
By Brad Wetzler

"I saw the old jalopy," said a bony stranger sitting across the table from me in a coffee shop in our ancient Southwestern city. He was sporting an armadillo-shaped bolo tie and a cowboy hat, and he squinted like a B-movie gunslinger about to draw his Colt .45. "I placed my fingers in the bullet holes."

Between tugs on a grande latte, the old compadre described a black 1922 Dodge convertible with four on the floor and wood spokes. The owner had been none other than Francisco "Pancho" Villa, the Mexican outlaw-turned-revolutionary who championed the poor by helping to topple the brutal despot Porfirio Díaz in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and evaded U.S. troops after a murderous cross-border foray. In fact, he allowed, this was the very set of wheels Villa had been driving when he was assassinated in 1923 by seven mystery gunmen. According to the coffee-shop cowboy, who'd set eyes on the vehicle in the late 1970s, the old beater was sitting up on blocks in the backyard of a house that belonged to Villa's widow on the outskirts of the city of Chihuahua, Mexico.

I've always been intrigued by this mythical, sombreroed hero. And northern Mexico, the desolate land where Villa lived, has been the scene of several harebrained "expeditions of discovery" of mine over the last ten years. Now Pancho's car was all the excuse I needed to head south again for some desert mountain biking in the depths of nearby Copper Canyon. I packed my pickup and before long I was crossing the Rio Grande at El Paso and rolling down Mexico Highway 45, headed into a roiling sea of dust devils in the blistering mesquite desert in search of an old metal hunk of history.

The state of Chihuahua is Mexico's Texas: The skies are big, and the people are proud. But there is one significant difference between these neighboring lands—topography. Chihuahua's flat, notoriously dusty deserts and high plains, dotted with sprigs of piñon, are bisected by the 9,000-foot peaks of the Sierra Madre Occidental, which starts at the U.S. border and runs south, parallel to Mexico's Pacific coast, and ends near Mexico City. I planned to follow the spine of the range south to an isolated area called Barrancas del Cobre, Copper Canyon to English speakers. The name refers not to one particular gorge, but to a 25,000-square-mile region that includes seven river-carved canyons—the Batopilas, Candamena, Chinipas, Septentrion, Taraecua, Urique, and Verdes. Four of these are more than 5,900 feet deep—deeper than Arizona's Grand Canyon. Besides being the largest canyon system on the continent, Copper Canyon also happens to be riddled, as I'd discovered on previous trips to the region, with amazing singletrack, created by the Tarahumara Indians who live there.