Los Barrancas del Cobre, Mexico

[boney]

I took off for Mexico with a bunch of friends. The ride to Tucson included rain, strong winds, hail, snow, and lane sharing in Arizona when traffic backed up because of accidents.

We rode in at Nogalez. There's a stark contrast between American Soil and Mexican.


The first day in Mexico we went down to Hermosillo and spent the night in an X-Best Western. Had to ask for towels.
Here's the sunrise pic from my room.


Day two started early- we had 350 miles to cover and they were reputed to be "long" miles. That was an understatement. It was both the best and worst riding ever. The first 100 miles was straight across the Sonora Desert- good thing we got started early. The next 200- oh my god. You gotta love the Mexican road engineers. They don't like to build bridges, so the roads follow the terrain into every draw and valley and then back out.
Sometimes it took 5 miles to go across a 1/2 mile wide canyon.


The problem is that around every corner there may be:
A) A bus on your side
B) A Burro
C) A herd of cows (mean looking ones with horns)
D) Gravel
E) A pothole the width of the road

Ride carefully. There's a reason mexicans are always driving slow.


EDIT:
There is no conceivable way I can portray the amazing ride across Hwy 16. My GS was loaded, wearing DOT knobbies and I managed to round the edges off the the outside row of knobs. Here is a track I pulled out of the GPS overlayed into Google Earth. Mind you, I can't get the whole thing into one image- Imagine about 8 of these images lined up: