Copper Canyon is not one canyon but six, cut by six rivers into the Sierra Madre of northern Mexico, spread over far more ground than the Grand Canyon. The deepest of them, the Barranca de Urique, falls 1,879 metres from rim to river, the deepest in North America. That drop stacks two countries on top of each other. In January the pines on the rim near Creel take frost, while the floor a kilometre below sits at a citrus-growing twenty-five degrees. Most people meet it from a train. El Chepe, the Chihuahua–Pacific railway, was surveyed in the 1880s, beaten for decades by the walls it had to climb, and finished only in 1961. It runs through 86 tunnels and over 37 bridges, much of it on ledges cut into the canyon wall, so the drop opens beside your window rather than ahead of the engine. Near Témoris the line loops back over itself and climbs three levels in a series of tunnels and switchbacks.
At Divisadero the train stops on a lip of rock where three canyons meet, long enough for you to step out over the gorge; a gondola runs nearly three kilometres out above the junction. The rim belongs to the Rarámuri, who live along it in log cabins and cave shelters and sell handwoven baskets and pine-needle work. They run, not as a sport but because this country has no roads. Hunting, carrying a message or reaching the next settlement can mean a hundred and sixty kilometres, in huarache sandals cut from tyre rubber. Their races chase a wooden ball, or a hoop for the women, across whole days and nights. Twenty minutes from Creel, rock columns up to thirty metres tall stand in the pine forest, known to the Rarámuri as Bisabírachi and to later arrivals as the petrified monks. Trails drop from the rim to Urique on the floor, a full day of switchbacks, the air warming at every turn, and by the time you reach the river the frost and the pines are a kilometre above your head.