Copper Canyon
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Photo
by Ron Mears |
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on the image for larger version |
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The Copper Canyon region is 25,000 square miles and stretches
across almost 1/3 of the state of Chihuahua, located in Northern Mexico.
If you board the Chihuahua al Pacifico train in Los Mochis you will pass
through the beautiful farmland of Sinaloa and then begin slowly climbing
into the Sierra Madres. If you board the train in Chihuahua the
high desert country of that region is also spectacular. Although
the train ascends as high as 8,000 feet near San Juanito, amazingly, the
angle of descent never exceeds 2.5%. The entire trip is 397 miles
and can take as long as 20 hours on the second class train and about three
hours less on the first class train.
Scenery ranges from old-growth Ponderosa Pines to pristine
snow capped mountains. There are two climate bands in the Sierra
Madres: the colder areas along the rims of the canyons and the sub-tropical
areas in the canyon bottoms. If you take a side trip into the canyons
you may see glistening lakes of pure fresh water and enormous waterfalls.
Bird watchers love this trip because the region has almost 300 species,
both indigenous and migratory. There are deer, bears, and large
hunting cats in the canyons as well.
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Photo
by Ron Mears |
| Click
on the image for larger version |
|
You will see firsthand why the railway is heralded as
an incredible engineering feat. The train passes through 87 tunnels.
Just north of Témoris it enters the Tunel la Pera, which
is 3,073 feet long and actually makes a 180 degree turn inside of the
mountain.
The railway engineers made equally impressive use of bridges,
of which there are 36, one of them towering 1,000 feet over the Chinípas
River. As you can see on the map, just north of El Divisadero the
tracks actually make a loop over themselves. This railroad required
100 years to build. Almost all of the 36 bridges on the route are over
100 feet tall, and one is 1,000 feet tall.
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