Fun and Wet Sneakers in the Sierra Gordo

After my multiple encounters with the Mexican highway police the day before, my desire when leaving San Miguel de Allende was to head for the remote wilderness on back roads.  Fortunately, this was already my plan.

My final sightseeing fling in Mexico, before I make a straight line for the border, is to explore the lush forestland of San Luis Potósi, home of mountains, waterfalls, and exotic wildlife.  So I set out for the town of Jalpan, in the heart of the National Park called the “Reserva de la Biosfera Sierra Gordo.” 

Jalpan is reached by a single road that winds into the mountains.  To get to it, however, entailed jumping back on Highway 56 for a short leg southward.  So spooked was I about that highway, that setting out on it (especially southward, i.e., back TOWARDS it) caused my heart to pound and my breath to get short.  In fact after a few moments I pulled over, grabbed my cellphone, looked at the map, and forced Google to choose a connecting route on secondary roads.  My theory was the smaller the road, the less likely it was to have highway patrols.  As soon as I was off Highway 56 I felt much safer.

It also led to a more interesting drive.  My one-lane connecting road ran through industrial farmland, past huge agribusinesses with their own rail lines, fields full of cows, horses grazing at roadside, a massive cowboy event that shut down the road to let a string of pickup trucks file out in a cloud of dust: a side of Mexico I hadn’t seen.  It’s funny: normally driving my yellow Miata through that sort of milieu would have made me nervous.  Now, as long as I saw no highway patrols, everyone was my friend.

Eventually the connecting road connected, to the even smaller road to Jalpan, and I headed up out of the flatlands and into the switchbacks.  At this point I felt safe enough to actually put the top down and enjoy the swing and swoop through the amazing green dorsals that began to rise and plunge around me under a blue sky.  My wounded Miata behaved wonderfully, as did I, considering it was the day after a road accident.  To be fair it was 20-mph swooping, as not only were the switchbacks that tight, but on the one-lane road I was frequently in a traffic jam, held up behind a grinding truck.  That was fine; when I got tired of the company I simply seized a pullout, stretched my legs, enjoyed the country air, then drove on in pleasant privacy (at least until I caught the tail of the traffic jam again).  The sun, the miles of forested mountains breathing around me, the vistas into hazy V-cut distances, all soothed my soul.

Jalpan is a cute little town in the middle of the “Reserva:” a pretty square with an old church and a couple of clean, cobbled streets with shops and restaurants.  After eating a late lunch of chicken fajitas at my Posada Mexico restaurant (where I’m staying, in a room off a dormitory-style hall in the back), I walked into the square to try to book a wilderness tour for the next day—the thing to do in the Reserva.

The tour companies had little kiosks on the square.  At first I struck out, as the company I spoke to didn’t have enough people to make a trip.  But in the morning after writing my blog post, when I wandered into the square wondering what to do, I found a different tour kiosk whose blue-shirted people were loading up their van and ready to set out on a waterfall tour in five minutes!  I jumped aboard.

It was a great fun day.  The tour went to the El Chuveje waterfall and the Puente de Dios ravine, two spots where the water pouring through these lush steep forests steps out in dramatic abandon in the privacy of hidden grottoes deep in the woods.  Though exposed now to the tourist trade their privacy is only slightly impaired: they’re hard to find, both accessed down bumpy, twisty dirt roads off the main road, followed by hikes on well-maintained trails.  There were six of us in the group, led by a nice-looking young guide with heavy dark curls and a scraggly dark beard, and I was the only English speaker, but everyone was friendly. 

It was a day when I really missed my camera; I used my cellphone—which takes terrible photos, almost unsalvageable even in post-processing—and otherwise tried to take the advice of Paul Theroux and Henry Miller and collect my impressions the old-fashioned way.  That began with the drive high up through the Sierra Gordo mountains, whose huge peaks and deep valleys were set exactly as far apart as great waves on the sea, though scaled enormously greater and carpeted in nubbly green treetops even up their sheerest sides.

El Chuveje was the more polite display, and even the more formally staged.  The hike led along the rushing stream of grey-green water, to a spot in the woods where a series of placid descending pools have been created with artificial berms.  With a brown grotto of trails on each side, romantic arched bridges spanning the stream, and huge trees lifting their dappled trunks from the water’s edge to a hang a ceiling of innumerable flecks of green and gold above, it looked rather like a movie set, but was no less charming for that.

A little further on was the Chuveje waterfall itself, a white plunge in the rough shape of a musical clef down smooth-bellied stone and serifs of diverging spray.  We lingered at the roaring green pool for a while.

The second attraction, the Puente de Dios, was a much more immersive affair—literally.  This trail followed its stream into a severe-sided ravine, and several times switched sides, necessitating fording the waters.  At first I tried to keep my sneakers dry, holding them up as I waded knee-deep on flat submerged rocks, but after a few of these I gave in, put them back on, and got delightfully wet in the cool mineral-blue surge of mountain water alongside all the other tourists. 

Our second guide helps one of our group ford the stream.

This is about how deep I got wet.

The path through the ravine became ever more dramatic, sometimes ascending on ladders through holes in the wet overhanging rock, sometimes following a catwalk along one wall of a cut so steep it seemed an interior space, like a room in a house given over to the thunder and green light of passing waters.  It ended in a surrealist vision of a cave: here the stream had cut a twenty-foot-high archway through a mass of overhanging rock and greenery, under which one could wade shin-deep, but there must have been water above too, because from the roof of the archway jets of it poured down, channeled through weird stone tunnels like inverted fumaroles.  The effect of waterfalls inside a cave was as if massive kitchen faucets were emptying into a covered sink. 

In short, by the end of the day I was bruised, sunburned, and soaked from my thighs down—a fabulous trip.