Two mountain streams meet at a cliff edge in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua and step off it together. That is Basaseachic Falls: a single unbroken drop of 246 metres into the Candameña canyon, and the tallest waterfall in Mexico that runs every day of the year. A short path through pine and oak takes you to the lip, where the river slides over the rock and disappears. The head-on view is from La Ventana, an overlook on the canyon wall opposite. From there you follow the whole column down and watch the wind take the water apart into mist long before it lands. Going to the bottom means switchbacks, an hour of hard walking each way, and the climb back out is the part your legs remember. Down there the fall arrives as spray and cold air, landing in a boulder-ringed pool in the shade of the cliffs.
Other trails leave the rim for the pine and oak woodland of the sierra, cool and resin-scented, the roar fading behind you and the canyon showing in glimpses between the trunks. Steller's jays screech from branch to branch, and the green-and-red mountain trogon shows itself now and then in the canopy. Where the woodland gives out on the dry slopes above the gorge, agaves and cacti root in bare rock, and in late spring the Echinocereus flowers come out crimson against the stone. This is Rarámuri country. The people of the Sierra Tarahumara call themselves the running people, and they cover enormous distances across these canyons on foot, often in simple sandals — a tradition that now draws ultra-runners from around the world. The fall changes through the year: a white thread by May, heaviest from July to September after the rains, when rainbows hang in the spray and a low roar fills the gorge. It is not the tallest waterfall in Mexico, though. A few kilometres up the same canyon, Piedra Volada drops 453 metres, nearly twice as far — but only while the summer rain lasts; the rest of the year it is bare rock.