Biking Copper Canyon: Mexico’s New Moab

Copper Canyon, for centuries the domain of the famously inexaustible Tarahumara Indians, is about to be seized by mountain bikers. That, at least, is the opinion of Los Angeles Times writer Christopher Reynolds. It is seconded by plenty of American off-road fanatics, including Chuck Nichols, the 55-year-old owner of the Poison Spider bike shop in Moab, who calls the 6,135-foot deep canyon (yes, deeper than the Grand Canyon) “another Moab waiting to happen.” Nichols tells us that the forboding Sierra Madre terrain is riddled with “trails that are 8,000 years old, trails that go everywhere, from the Tarahumara and the people who came before them. None of them are marked.” According to the Times, those trails here are the deepest downhill runs in the world, descending through a landscape is full of “lethal vistas, backcountry characters and ancient ways.”  Moab, in Mexico, with mystery.