Core truth.

And the reality with cultural travel is that true experiences are out there. It is what we deliver at Authentic Copper Canyon.

Real Guides

I tell my experts in Mexico to have fun, experience the trip each time freshly, get over yourself, and never never never neverdo a spiel. Just be there.

Real Lodges

We focus on the places that are truly local and at the same time ultimately comfortable and excellent. This way our guests have a full feeling of being in the Sierra Madres.

Real Food

We eat local- vendors, woodstove chefs, markets, cafes. And we drink local. Sotol- the drink of Chihuahua- as well as an array of home brewed delicious spirits including lechuguilla.

Real Connection

Our vision is personal connection for each of our guests with the people of Copper Canyon. We love this place. It is our only destination. To be there and to connect our guests with the Chihuahuans is our passion.

The sotol used was the same featured on NPR- Don Cuco Reposado. It should be noted that wine and spirits consultant, Paul Simpson commented when he sipped the smokey reposada last night that really no other ingredients are needed. This stuff is delicious straight or on ice.

Here are Andy’s two creations and the complete recipes are on The Blue Corn Express site - Andy’s Sotol #1 and Andy’s Sotol #2.

First was a strawberry, orange creation with Aperol and St Germain- sweet but not sweet.

Next was a Pernod invention with two kinds of bitters- oh my!

Andy included this note with the recipes:

The following cocktails were crafted on-the-fly to enhance but not overpower the intrinsic characteristics of sotol.  I sought to engage both ends of the cocktail spectrum by incorporating a sweeter, fruity flavor profile in one of the cocktails as well as a stronger, spirit-based profile in the second.  What you’ll find is that thee proportions let the sotol shine while taking two radically different detours into new flavor territories.

Note: Sotol from Don Cuco (really the best) is available in several state now and is coming soon to Chicago.

My wife soaks in the sunset at Mansion Tarahumara in Copper Canyon.

After countless trips to this paradise, I keep expecting to get tired of the place.

To the contrary it continues to amaze me.

• The Copper Canyon train still rolls through the most incredible landscape
• The Norteño food remains a favorite
• The local people are so cordial
• The weather always seems to reveal some wonder of the local scene- we had some snow this trip

This morning on Morning Edition on NPR, our friends from Janos north of Copper Canyon were featured.  The Jaquez family were interviewed and the spot gave great background and promo for sotol and Don Cuco Sotol in particular.

What is sotol?

This distilled spirit is THE drink of Chihuahua. It is a tequilla-like drink made from the plant sotol. This spiny plant grows wild in the high Chihuahuan desert. The drink comes in many forms and in years past was made by local people and consumed on special occasions.

Who makes sotol?

Local people still make it. On a recent visit to Chihuahua with a Copper Canyon tour I was leading, my dentist gave me a couple of shots from a bottle he had gotten on the street in Madera. Then a few days later I bought 2 liters in a recycled Coke bottle in Areponapuchi. Then we received some from a hotel owner as a gift- no label.

Several companies produce it in Aldama and Delicias….but I think Don Cuco leads the pack for flavor and choice and varieties. They even have a crema that is like Baileys.

How can I get sotol?

Larger liquor stores have some types now. Don Cuco is available in  a few states and is coming soon to Illinois.

Can I go see how they make it?

Yes…absolutely! My small group tours of Copper Canyon include a stop at the Don Cuco hacienda the last day and you can even buy a few bottles to bring back.

Don Cuco sotol...THE drink of Chihuahua.

CHIHUAHUA, Mexico – I won’t lie: I had some qualms about traveling alone to the Copper Canyon, a series of awe-inspiring gorges bigger than the Grand Canyon that happen to be in the same northwestern region of Mexico consumed by drug-trafficking violence.

At the same time, I knew from being in the news business that tourists are seldom, if ever, the target of such violence. I also was aware of the tendency to paint an entire region with a bleak brush when only small pockets are actually affected.

I’m glad I shrugged off the doubts. My trip to Las Barrancas del Cobre, as they are known in Spanish, was a great adventure. And I can confidently say that travelling here is safe — especially if you stick to the route of el Chepe, the government-run train that this year celebrates its 50th anniversary depositing tourists and commuters along a 650-kilometre stretch from Los Mochis in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa to Chihuahua city, capital of Chihuahua state. The canyons themselves are all located within Chihuahua state’s borders.

There were moments off the train that gave me pause, such as when a native in the old silver mining town of Batopilas remarked, “Here, we see nothing, we hear nothing and we say nothing if we want to wake up alive each morning.” In that same town, where the drug-fighting military keep a high profile, I took pictures of attractive colonial-style building facades before realizing that at least two of them bore more than a dozen deep holes that could only have been rendered by the bullets of a high-powered weapon, the kind favoured by Mexican drug traffickers.

And yet, during my brief stay, Batopilas was peaceful to the point of being comatose.

As I wandered through the narrow streets, men tipped their cowboy hats in deference, young couples and children posed amiably for photographs, and museum guides and hotel owners alike were eager to educate me on the town’s rich mining and Indian cultural history.

Frankly, the scariest part of my trip was getting there, in a small van that for much of the 4 1/2-hour trip swerved, bounced and braked as it made a precipitous descent from nearly 2,400 metres to 560 metres on unpaved, switchback roads with no guardrails.

Then there was a different type of scare, one that I chose: I ziplined at heights of up to nearly 450 metres over the Copper Canyon and tap-danced across two wobbly hanging bridges, albeit while wearing a helmet and being firmly attached to a steel cable that would prevent me from catapulting over the edge and into the depths below.

The scenery was thrilling too: The cliffs of the 1,800-metre-deep Batopilas Canyon glowed red in the sun, sharp-edged mountain peaks repeated themselves in a visual bluish echo far into the distance, and a brown river that from above looked to be the width of a thread twisted its way across the canyon floor.

During my one-night stay at the Copper Canyon, a gorge named for the entire range, a full white, button-size moon rose above cliffs darkening into silhouettes of themselves as a dying sun infused horizontal cloud strips with pink and orange blush.

The Posada Barrancas Mirador hotel is literally built on the rim of the canyon. In the past, it was jammed with tourists, but I was one of only 17 guests on a night in early November. That meant the Mirador’s “happy hour with a view” felt less like a moneymaking diversion for tourists and more like a small, pleasant gathering of friends. As I sat in a comfy leather chair sipping a local grain alcohol known as Sotol in front of a fireplace, I could fantasize that this was my own private lodge to which I had invited a few guests for a quiet evening.

“Usually this time of year, we’d have about 120 people here,” said the hotel’s client services manager, David Varela, referring to the large groups of U.S. tourists who have always been the region’s biggest clients. Back in the good days, Varela noted, every season was “high season,” with the exception of August and September.

But the global economic crisis, the 2009 swine flu scare, and a steady increase in and attention to Mexico’s drug-related violence have devastated tourism throughout the entire Copper Canyon. Now Americans stay away while Mexicans, who never had much interest in visiting the region, are starting to respond to a nationwide campaign urging citizens to explore their country, Varela said. Still, he says this isn’t nearly enough to make up for the overall loss.

To those who stay away out of fear, I would simply say: Don’t.

First of all, el Chepe (the train) is patrolled by heavily armed state police officers who are there to stop any potential robberies or assaults. You take one look at them and you know they mean business. One of them, Hugo Sergio Guerrero Lazo (“guerrero” means warrior, by the way), told me he hasn’t seen any problems during the 2 1/2 years he’s been on the job.

Second, if you decide to take one of the hundreds of hiking trails or to camp in canyon sites far from the train tracks, hire a guide who knows the area. There are plenty of them and they are all looking for work.

In the lovely colonial city of El Fuerte in the Pacific state of Sinaloa, a guide led me down the El Rio River in a small wooden boat he rowed himself while rattling off the names of myriad winged species — egrets, blue herons, hawks, cardinals, ospreys and cranes among them — that literally flock to this internationally known bird sanctuary.

He tied the boat to a tree overhanging a riverbank and led me traipsing through bush and bramble until we reached hilltop boulders marked by petroglyphs, symbolic drawings of sun gods, plumed serpents, mystical coyotes and shamans believed to have to have been etched by the Nahautl Indians hundreds of years ago.

For my zipline tour, I and a half-dozen others took transportation arranged by the Mirador hotel to a state-run park, where we were met and escorted by guides.

In the town of Creel, The 3 Amigos tour company connected me with a guide descended from the Tarahumara Indians, who live in large numbers throughout the Copper Canyon. He took me to see giant stones sculpted by nature into whimsical shapes in the aptly named Valley of the Mushrooms and Frogs and Valley of the Monks.

If you’re feeling adventurous, The 3 Amigos and other outlets rent bikes, scooters and four-wheel drives and provide maps for self-guided trips. I met a U.S. and Australian man, each travelling separately, who’d run into each other the day before and decided to ride mountain bikes together down the dusty switchbacks into the Batopilas Canyon. They arrived hours later than expected due to multiple punctured tires, but agreed the trip was amazing.

As a woman traveling alone, however, I found the best way to explore the Copper Canyon was to jump on and off el Chepe and stay in hotels built specifically along the route for train travelers.

Nearly every day of the journey, I met people from all over the world who agreed with me: This trip is worth taking.

When you are ready to go call Dave at 217.369.9897 or email davehensleigh@gmail.com.

CHIHUAHUA, Mexico – I won’t lie: I had some qualms about traveling alone to the Copper Canyon, a series of awe-inspiring gorges bigger than the Grand Canyon that happen to be in the same northwestern region of Mexico consumed by drug-trafficking violence.

At the same time, I knew from being in the news business that tourists are seldom, if ever, the target of such violence. I also was aware of the tendency to paint an entire region with a bleak brush when only small pockets are actually affected.

I’m glad I shrugged off the doubts. My trip to Las Barrancas del Cobre, as they are known in Spanish, was a great adventure. And I can confidently say that travelling here is safe — especially if you stick to the route of el Chepe, the government-run train that this year celebrates its 50th anniversary depositing tourists and commuters along a 650-kilometre stretch from Los Mochis in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa to Chihuahua city, capital of Chihuahua state. The canyons themselves are all located within Chihuahua state’s borders.

There were moments off the train that gave me pause, such as when a native in the old silver mining town of Batopilas remarked, “Here, we see nothing, we hear nothing and we say nothing if we want to wake up alive each morning.” In that same town, where the drug-fighting military keep a high profile, I took pictures of attractive colonial-style building facades before realizing that at least two of them bore more than a dozen deep holes that could only have been rendered by the bullets of a high-powered weapon, the kind favoured by Mexican drug traffickers.

And yet, during my brief stay, Batopilas was peaceful to the point of being comatose.

As I wandered through the narrow streets, men tipped their cowboy hats in deference, young couples and children posed amiably for photographs, and museum guides and hotel owners alike were eager to educate me on the town’s rich mining and Indian cultural history.

Frankly, the scariest part of my trip was getting there, in a small van that for much of the 4 1/2-hour trip swerved, bounced and braked as it made a precipitous descent from nearly 2,400 metres to 560 metres on unpaved, switchback roads with no guardrails.

Then there was a different type of scare, one that I chose: I ziplined at heights of up to nearly 450 metres over the Copper Canyon and tap-danced across two wobbly hanging bridges, albeit while wearing a helmet and being firmly attached to a steel cable that would prevent me from catapulting over the edge and into the depths below.

The scenery was thrilling too: The cliffs of the 1,800-metre-deep Batopilas Canyon glowed red in the sun, sharp-edged mountain peaks repeated themselves in a visual bluish echo far into the distance, and a brown river that from above looked to be the width of a thread twisted its way across the canyon floor.

During my one-night stay at the Copper Canyon, a gorge named for the entire range, a full white, button-size moon rose above cliffs darkening into silhouettes of themselves as a dying sun infused horizontal cloud strips with pink and orange blush.

The Posada Barrancas Mirador hotel is literally built on the rim of the canyon. In the past, it was jammed with tourists, but I was one of only 17 guests on a night in early November. That meant the Mirador’s “happy hour with a view” felt less like a moneymaking diversion for tourists and more like a small, pleasant gathering of friends. As I sat in a comfy leather chair sipping a local grain alcohol known as Sotol in front of a fireplace, I could fantasize that this was my own private lodge to which I had invited a few guests for a quiet evening.

“Usually this time of year, we’d have about 120 people here,” said the hotel’s client services manager, David Varela, referring to the large groups of U.S. tourists who have always been the region’s biggest clients. Back in the good days, Varela noted, every season was “high season,” with the exception of August and September.

But the global economic crisis, the 2009 swine flu scare, and a steady increase in and attention to Mexico’s drug-related violence have devastated tourism throughout the entire Copper Canyon. Now Americans stay away while Mexicans, who never had much interest in visiting the region, are starting to respond to a nationwide campaign urging citizens to explore their country, Varela said. Still, he says this isn’t nearly enough to make up for the overall loss.

To those who stay away out of fear, I would simply say: Don’t.

First of all, el Chepe (the train) is patrolled by heavily armed state police officers who are there to stop any potential robberies or assaults. You take one look at them and you know they mean business. One of them, Hugo Sergio Guerrero Lazo (“guerrero” means warrior, by the way), told me he hasn’t seen any problems during the 2 1/2 years he’s been on the job.

Second, if you decide to take one of the hundreds of hiking trails or to camp in canyon sites far from the train tracks, hire a guide who knows the area. There are plenty of them and they are all looking for work.

In the lovely colonial city of El Fuerte in the Pacific state of Sinaloa, a guide led me down the El Rio River in a small wooden boat he rowed himself while rattling off the names of myriad winged species — egrets, blue herons, hawks, cardinals, ospreys and cranes among them — that literally flock to this internationally known bird sanctuary.

He tied the boat to a tree overhanging a riverbank and led me traipsing through bush and bramble until we reached hilltop boulders marked by petroglyphs, symbolic drawings of sun gods, plumed serpents, mystical coyotes and shamans believed to have to have been etched by the Nahautl Indians hundreds of years ago.

For my zipline tour, I and a half-dozen others took transportation arranged by the Mirador hotel to a state-run park, where we were met and escorted by guides.

In the town of Creel, The 3 Amigos tour company connected me with a guide descended from the Tarahumara Indians, who live in large numbers throughout the Copper Canyon. He took me to see giant stones sculpted by nature into whimsical shapes in the aptly named Valley of the Mushrooms and Frogs and Valley of the Monks.

If you’re feeling adventurous, The 3 Amigos and other outlets rent bikes, scooters and four-wheel drives and provide maps for self-guided trips. I met a U.S. and Australian man, each travelling separately, who’d run into each other the day before and decided to ride mountain bikes together down the dusty switchbacks into the Batopilas Canyon. They arrived hours later than expected due to multiple punctured tires, but agreed the trip was amazing.

As a woman traveling alone, however, I found the best way to explore the Copper Canyon was to jump on and off el Chepe and stay in hotels built specifically along the route for train travelers.

Nearly every day of the journey, I met people from all over the world who agreed with me: This trip is worth taking.

When you are ready to go call Dave at 217.369.9897 or email davehensleigh@gmail.com.

I love these simple pots that these two young women in Mata Ortiz are producing. I mistakenly got away without writing down their names. Their Dad is Efrain Lucero and they live at the south end of the main drag in Mata.

These young women really seem to enjoy what they do...and these lizard pots are a specialty of theirs.

The finished product...amazing!

What made it so perfect?

-Planning: I worked with the group for hours before the trip to make sure the itinerary was just in line with their ineterests.

-Guides: My team here did their very best…Gustavo, Alfredo, Alma, Diana, Chal, Sol and all the crew busted it to give them an inside view of things here.

-Hotels and lodges: Hospitality and accommodations were excellent- like hot coffee at our doors early on a frosty morning at Noritari.

-A First Time: We traveled the new road from Batopilas to Urique- a first for any tour group ever- what a huge scenic experience- like being on top of the world!

I could go on and on.

And yes everyone felt secure and we were perfectly safe.

I look forward to many such journeys in 2012!

Here is the deal:

The first class train still leaves at 6a from both Chihuahua City and Los Mochis. Now the second train is hooked onto that first train, so they both leave at 6a. The second train still goes Chihuahua to Mochis on Thursday, Saturday and Monday. The it goes from Mochis to Chihuahua on Friday, Sunday, and Tuesday.

Cost for the second train is half that of first and it is about the same- just no bar or restaurant.

Most Copper Canyon tours still use the first train.

Chepe leaving Chihuahua at 6a on a fall day recently.

Here is the info from the CHEPE site:

Last update: September 29, 2011

Important Notes:
In the Divisadero station passengers have 15 minutes to get off the train and admire the canyon. For your safety, another station is not allowed down to its final destination.
On this train reservations are not dish locations.
Check with local time in Chihuahua City. Must report to the station 30 minutes before departure time.
Prices and schedules subject to change without notice. These fees already include 16% VAT. Ladas FREE: Nacional 01 800 122-4373 • International: 1 888 484-1623 RESERVATIONS AND TICKETS: 01 (614) 439-7212 Option 1 • chepe@ferromex.com.mx MANAGEMENT TOURISM: 01 (614) 439-7210 • FAX: 01 (614) 439-7208

Here are some highlights for each season.

Spring- very dry and weather is easy to handle.

Summer- starting July 1 or so it rains often. This greens everything up and the water falls flow.

Fall- green and cool- some think this is the ideal season, but it can get stormy.

Winter- nice at lower elevations. We might get a snow at higher places.

Here is our 2012 calendar for Copper Canyon tours- including both New Years trips.