Story: Ascent to the Land of the Raramuri

El Chepe is nearly empty and seating unassigned. I settle into the last car for the same reason that I always ran to the last car of the roller coaster when I was a kid, hoping for that zero-gravity thrill somewhere along the journey. I wonder if ascending 7,600 feet into the Sierra Madres of northern Mexico will offer such a thrill. We roll forward, away from the alluring colonial town of El Fuerte where I have chosen to begin my journey. My destination: Creel, a town in the high Sierras that sits in the heart of Raramuri country.

For a few hours there is little to see but a flat dusty terrain dotted with mesquite, cacti, scrub forest, and an occasional lonely steer. El Chepe, the nickname for Ferrocarril Chihuahua Pacifico, rises out of the Sinaloan lowlands on the Sea of Cortez and provides the only route all the way through Copper Canyon, over the Sierra Madre Occidental, terminating in the city of Chihuahua.

As we climb, mesquite scrub gives way to lush tropical forest. Passengers perk up. Gazes gravitate toward the windows. Soon we are rapt, pressing into open spaces between the cars, vying for a windowless view and the best photo shots. New landscapes sneak up around every curve. Canyon walls close in and then suddenly give way to expansive vistas only to close in again. We cross a high trestle and skirt a ridge, an expansive green river valley falling away below. Light vanishes and reappears as we pass through tunnel after tunnel. In the distance of a hundred miles, we ascend 5,000 feet, and in the process experience three climate zones, cross thirty-seven bridges, and pass through eighty-six tunnels. And my journey has just begun.

Some people board trains to travel from Point A to Point B, others to experience the journey. Here, the journey's path follows one of the world's greatest engineering triumphs against a backdrop of unmatched natural splendor. Copper Canyon is a vast series of five interconnected canyons, three of them deeper than Arizona's Grand Canyon.

In a deep, forested valley with soaring walls, we come to a stop at a tiny station, not much more than a wide spot in the tracks. There I get my first glimpse of the Raramuri (known also as Tarahumara), the men in white billowy tops and triangular loincloths; the women in full skirts, long-sleeved blousy tops, and headscarves, all beautifully mismatched. Together, they are a patchwork of vibrant colors and patterns. The women meekly offer baskets to the few passengers getting on or off the train, and before El Chepe's wheels have time to cool we are rolling on. We ascend to a pine-forested plateau, where small log and stone dwellings dot the landscape among herds of sheep and goats. These are Raramuri homes, and if I didn't already know where I was, I would swear I was in Alaska or Lapland.

We pass a crew of railroad workers taking a break beside the tracks in the middle of nowhere, eating their lunches out of bandana-wrapped bundles, tools at their sides. A few of them wave as we pass. I marvel at the effort that must be required to maintain such an infrastructure. The project to construct the railway was a daunting and ambitious one that from concept to completion spanned nearly a century. The canyons were generally regarded as impassable, and many times construction was abandoned after its financiers deemed the project foolhardy. But a dream of a route across the Sierras managed to live on. In 1961, the most difficult stretch of canyon was finally linked and the project completed. The dream became a reality of rails, trestles, and tunnels, changing life in and around the canyon forever.

El Chepe continues to climb, loops over itself on a great circular trestle to lessen the grade, and pulls toward a stop on the canyon rim. This is the Copper Canyon I've been expecting – an unbroken panorama that stretches miles across a giant fissure in the earth. The conductor allows us to disembark to soak in the view, and when the train rolls on again, we gradually descend through a rough landscape of boulders and pines, farms and ranches. Next stop: Creel, a small alpine town and hub of Raramuri life.

Creel has a wild west, high country feel to it. I am here in the fall, and the air is crisp with frost covering the ground in the morning and remaining in shady spots long after the day wears on. One stroll through town and I feel I've seen all there is to see – the little plaza, the Mission artisan market that sells Raramuri crafts, the main street with its raised wooden sidewalks like a town in a western – but since I've come more for the journey than the destination, I decide to broaden my horizons. I hire a guide, a local man born and raised in Creel. I figure if anyone knows the region's highlights and secrets, he will. After a ten minute drive out of town on a dusty road, and a short walk up a hill, he leads me to the mouth of a cave. The cave walls are black from years of wood smoke, and sections of it are barricaded off with makeshift log walls and doors for privacy. This is a Raramuri family's home. There are no men present, and two women simply stand and stare at me. My guide invites me to look around, but I feel like an intruder. Then I realize that the occasional gringo creeping through their house provides an income they otherwise might not have. One of the women moves to a corner of the cave to show me a display of pine-needle baskets and little embroidered hankies. I purchase baskets I don't need, leave a tip to show my gratitude, and wonder how Raramuris made a living before the railroad brought people like me. I imagine they were more self-sufficient with the vast high Sierras mostly to themselves.

Farther outside of Creel, among mushroom-like boulder formations and 18th century missions, the Raramuris live in log cabins in the middle of meadows where herds of goats graze. In the more remote areas, I see no vehicles and I inquire how the people manage to get around so far from town. The answer I find surprises me. They run. In their language, "rara" means "runner," and "muri" means "steep." The Raramuris are known as some of the best endurance runners in the world, all the more remarkable because the mainstay of their diet is corn. They run as a means of transportation, as competitive sport, and in ceremony. The landscape is unforgiving, especially in the canyon, and Raramuri men and women, I am told, have been known to run for days without stopping, scrambling up and down canyon trails even in the dark.

El Chepe carries me back down toward El Fuerte, past the same gasp-inducing vistas I saw on the way up, and I consider the rugged world behind me in the Sierra Madres, a land of vertical canyons and cave-dwellers, runners and pine-needle baskets. For me this journey is not a passage from point A to Point B, but one through a world that as recently as 1961 remained inaccessible to all but the most adventuresome traveler.