Creel, Switzerland
Yesterday I went on an all-day mountain biking adventure with an Italian, Spaniard, and Switzerlander, and older by me by at least six years. The sights, the company, and the ride were all wonderful. Only the bike was a real pain-in-the-ass.
Starting right at the hostel, Casa Margarita, in Creel, we were able to enter directly into a wilderness area which I believe could be managed by the Tarahama, the indigenous people of this region who have successfully capitalized on tourism by selling crafts and charging entrance to many places, but still practice much of their traditional way of life. They live high up in the bluffs in the summer, and low in the valleys in the winter. They grow corn, beans, and other crops.
The Tarahama are famous for their mountain-goat like ability to travel up and down the canyon sides and hunt deer and play sports over this terrain as well. One of their main hunting techniques is to chase deer off the edge of cliffs onto spikes or traps they’ve set below. They are fantastic runners, and run races of 100km in the steep up-and-dpwn terrain in sandals which are today made of cleverly recycled tire remnants.
We visited “El Valle de Los Monjes,” (panorama above, composite of 5 original images) which the Swiss woman compared to to Brice Canyon in Arizona. There were impressive and colorful spires of rock reaching up, I would estimate, at least 50 meters. I’m assuming that the spires were formed from more durable pieces of rock, and that softer pieces of the original rock were worn away. The backdrop to “El Valle de Los Monjes” is another incredibly green valley. In fact, everything around Creel here in the Copper Canyon is an incredibly lush, including abundant evergreen trees. For this reason, hiking with the Europeans yesterday was especially disorienting. Plenty of folks have commented that the terrain, the grass, and the forests have the appearance of the Swiss alps, and so hearing German and Swiss-German spoken at the hostel made me all the more disoriented. One thing, though: I don’t think you will find a nice hostel with two meals a day for less than $10US per day in the Swiss Alps.
After visiting a lake, the Italian, Spaniard, and I left the Swiss to bike to a waterfall. The ride there was really fun, on very poorly maintained roads through pastures and valleys, and the sides of the canyon we biked up to were tall, making for great views of the canyon below. If, that is, it wasn’t for the thick rain which prevented us from seeing much more than faint outlines in the grey of the air. I’m including this picture of Alex, the Italian, just because he looks so miserable in the photo. Despite the appearance of this photo, though, Alex was having a great time, as he was a very adventurous and positive person. We were all having a great time; even I was after I had two blowouts (one occurred after the first tube was replaced), and I ended up riding on the rims for a few kilometers. It was a shitty bike anyway, and place I rented it from was a rip-off, so there.
aaron :: Aug.07.2006 :: México ::