Madera to Basaseachi Falls

I retraced the road back to Madera and past the turn-off to the east that I had taken two days ago, and onto a busy town called Guerrero. I had been told about the Hermosillo road that is well reported as a great riding road that winds for hundreds of kilometres across these mountains known as the Sierra Madras Occidental. It is to the north of Copper Canyon and is a gateway from Chihuahua to the east and Hermosillo to the west. It is infamous because huge trucks servicing the logging industry in this area use it, and the logging trucks themselves are often overloaded with poor tyres and brakes.

I rode sixty kilometres of tight, winding roads that wound up to the crest of a mountain and down to a bridge before turning to rise again. The road was generally in quite good condition but there were sections where the surface was crazed and rough; quite a lot of potholes, often right on a bend; few safety barriers and the edge of the road finished at a near vertical drop into a ravine, not huge depths but enough to spoil a trip around the world if you went over.

Along the way were the telltale signs of a truck that had gone over and lost its load. Paint and oil patches on the road and the adjacent rock face, sections of guard rail (where there were some) that had been taken out by vehicles, and gouges in the road from a heavy metal vehicle sliding on its side to an abrupt stop into a cliff.

Every bend had a mystery waiting behind it. Would it have loose gravel and rocks that had fallen from the road’s high side? Would a speeding pick-up or truck came around using half of my lane? Would there be snow still remaining from the unseasonable fall a week ago?

There were some rudimentary road signs but no advisory speed limits, although officially the whole area was a 40km/h zone.

I came across the inevitable and it did not seem to be very long ago. A loaded semi-trailer had come down a very long winding descent and failed to take the last right hand bend before the bridge and the subsequent ascent. It had tipped, slid right across my lane and off the side of the bridge. It was lying upside down with the cabin smashed. 

(Look at the video of Basaseachi Falls at the bottom of the page - it opens at the top of the page!)

‘Everyone ok?’ I asked one of the three men standing on the road at the scene. He shook his head and waved me on. I rode on with extra caution realizing that any bend could also have an overturned truck sliding down my side of the road.

It was getting late in the afternoon and I was riding west so the sun was in my eyes from time to time as I took the bends and I realised I wasn't going to make it to Basaseachi today.

I wound down a particularly tight, winding section and the town of Tomachi opened up in front of me. The road through the town ran east-west and the sun was just above the mountains and blinded my view. There was a traffic jam and I stopped behind a line of various logging trucks. There was a thick smoke hovering over the town, a mixture of smoky diesel engines and wood fires. The sun shining through this thick haze made visibility impossible so I stopped for five minutes to wait for the sun to disappear and make visibility better.

I tried taking some photos but nothing looked any good and certainly couldn't relay the view of the town. I looked for a hotel and rode down a rocky side-street and pulled up at what looked like a hotel. A woman came out and by this stage I was quite adept at asking for a room - una habitacion - and a gate was opened to reveal a stony courtyard and a few semi-detached rooms.

The room had a wood heater that the owner lit for me and a nice touch was the boiling water in the red kettle.

The owner and his daughter in the morning

One of the realities of travelling light with minimal clothes is that you need to wash a couple of items almost every day. I only have two t-shirts and three underwear, so this is a regular routine when I stop.

The next day I reached the turnoff to Basaseachi Falls – Cascada de Basaseachi and followed the narrower winding road to the entrance of the park where I paid 56 Pesos ($4) entry. A one-lane road wound through the thick pine trees to terminate in a parking area overlooking a magnificent rocky gorge and the waterfall. Cascada de Basaseachi is one of the tallest waterfalls in Mexico with a drop of 246 metres. Another waterfall in the same park Piedra Volada falls 453 metres but it isn’t accessible by bike, requiring a walking trail. There wasn’t a lot of information or assistance available to find the second falls, but it was easy to spend a couple of hours at Basaseachi walking down to the various vantage points.

At one of the points I met two young couples, three of whom spoke English well. Two were from Chihuahua and the other two from Mexico City. Once again the openness, friendliness, sense of humour and sense of fun of Mexican people was apparent. We had lots of laughs as we swapped stories about our countries and travel.

Stephanie took a shining to my bike

While I was there some other bikes arrived so we caught up to compare and talk about bikes…naturally. 

One of the Ducatis was the most radical bike I had ever seen on the streets. It had racing slicks, all of the superfluous panels removed, including the covers for some of the belts operating the engine. Not street legal in most of the world I guess but in Mexico, anything goes!