Trail Rider Magazine

26 Trail Rider www.TrailRider.com The Border - No pictures, por favor. Border personnel even check to make sure GoPros are off. There are ru- mors their sense of humor is surgically removed as part of the start work physical. I believe it. The actual cross- ing was pre y quick, but we spent a solid half hour ge ng vehicle permits. Don't get caught without one. You give Mexico $400 that gets returned when you take your vehicle back out of Mexico. One more stop to buy pesos, and we were southbound clowns without frowns. The day's route to our hotel in Sahuaripa was a few hundred miles through the Sierra Madres Moun- tain range. There was gravel, sweet twisty asphalt, and not-so-sweet asphalt disguised as sweet asphalt. The not-so-sweet stuff looked OK, but there were pot holes that would hold a five-gallon bucket. You'd see the guy in front of you suddenly twitch to one side or the other as if a dog ran into the road. Only, there was no dog. It was a great wake-up call for those tempted to fiddle with the many distrac ons provided by today's modern motorcycle cockpit. And there was near zero traffic. Lunch was had at a classic roadside can na where the carne was probably mooing yesterday. No need to refrigerate a live cow, if you catch my dri . A er lunch the hills got bigger, the roads got twis er, the trees got taller, and our distance above sea level grew. The sweet twis es were like dancing with a cutey that knows how to dance, while she gazes into your eyes. By dusk (barely), we were at The Hotel Alameda in Sahuaripa sipping chilled Cervezas and looking off the veranda at a sunset taken from the Hotel California album cover. Palm trees and everything. A er dinner at the hotel restaurant, JJ advised we walk down the street for some an -freeze, so we did. I learned my capacity for blue Margheritas that night. We were all bunked by 2230 and dreaming of tomorrow's romp to Creele. In Creele we'd be ge ng into Tarahumara (Rara- muri) Territory. Raramuri are an indigenous people that skeedaddled to the hills around Copper Canyon when the Spanish showed up on Mexican shores 500-plus years ago. Over the centuries they did ba le with the Spaniards a few mes but for the most part remained quiet subsistence farmers in the Copper Canyon Region. They came to the mod- ern world's a en on because of extraordinary long distance running skills and an amazing lack of the illnesses that plague modern cultures. Everyone in the tribe runs. It's what they have done for centuries to communicate between widely sca ered villages. They have annual 200-mile running races between villages that go on for 24 hours. We were looking forward to seeing their running grounds first-hand. Next Month – Blindingly beau ful scenery, small towns, and perilous roads through the gut of Copper Canyon

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