Midnight Mexican Mountain Run – Oaxaca, Southwestern Mexico

Midnight Mexican Mountain Run
Oaxaca, Southwestern Mexico

At 3:30 in the morning, under a lopsided moon and dazzling stars, we were loping along pine-needly paths, three bobbing flashlights in the spruce and pine forests of Mexico’s Sierra Norte mountains. We had five miles, 2000 feet, and two hours to get to a particularly nice rock in time to see the sun come thundering up over this, the southern tail of the Sierra Madre Ocidentale that are, they say, high enough to see the mountains on the Caribbean coast 200 miles to the north. By the way we were moving, though, we were evidently running late.

Temperate Rainforest of the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca Range

Two days ago, Brian and I made reservations to tear around in the woods in the middle of the night at the Expediciones Sierra Norte reservation office, which is tucked into a shady cloister wrapped around the sunny patio and gurgling fountain that it shares with Becari language school in downtown Oaxaca. The girl in the Sierra Norte office was remarkably young, had braids to her waist, and seemed sincerely happy to see us.

She beamed and giggled as she took our reservation for a cabin for the night and a guide (you have to have a guide to hike, bike, or camp in the Sierra Norte), and radio’d up to Llano Grande, the little forest hamlet where we’d be staying. “I’m sending two up for tomorrow night. O.K., William?” William, on the other end, and said, “O.K.” and it was official. Yesterday, when we arrived, William met us as we got off the bus. He is twelve and took us to the little comedor restaurant where the girl from the ticket office was manning the smoky stove and fed us chicken stuffed tortillas and apple marmalade. Everybody in Llano Grande, it seems, plays many parts of Ecoturismo Sierra Norte.

The girl had handed us a slip of paper with precise, kind of Hitchcockian, instructions for getting to Llano Grande. It said, “Go to the second-class bus station and catch La Flecha Zempoatepetl at 2 o’clock.”

The Flecha Zempoatepetl, or, the Arrow of Zempoatepetl, and is a vintage Bluebird bus with a plump and curving hood and jaunty teal stripe down her flanks. La Flecha serves all of the little towns in the Sierra Norte mountains, sixty-six kilometers and years away from cosmopolitan Oaxaca. In fact, Sierra Norte’s little towns and hamlets are far from the city in lots of ways. For example, they are so haughtily autonomous that they don’t recognize Mexican Daylight Savings Time. “We recognize God’s time,” says the lady in the little Sierra Norte booth at the bus station. In her booth and all over the Sierra it is one hour later than everywhere else in the whole country. That’s an important thing to keep in mind if you need to catch the bus to or from these towns in the summer.

But at that moment, in the dark, the woods were chilly as a crisper drawer, more like April in Virginia than August in Mexico, It seemed impossible that somewhere there were gurgling fountains in sunny patios, but I was steaming up jogging along in a t-shirt, a sweater, and a fleece. Alarmingly, Adelfo, our wedge-shaped machine of a guide, was picking up speed. Zooming through a particularly pleasant fern-crammed glen, I gasped conversationally, “How nice that people walk all over these mountains on these paths. They must be very fit.” “Oh, no body walks anymore,” said Adelfo bitterly, “Everyone’s fat and lazy. They all take the bus.” He wasn’t even breathing with his mouth open yet. “Oh,” I wheezed.

For an hour and a half, in the dark, sopping ferns slapped our calves, and my granola-stuffed fanny pack spanked me along behind the goofy Atlanta Braves Indian logo on Adelfo’s nylon jacket, his automaton arms pistoning with a relentless whish whish and Brian trotting nimbly behind, keeping up a steady, “Oops, watch it there” every time I tripped over a root. On and on, our boots clomped double-time up and down broad, abandoned logging roads, nighttime game tracks, into hemlocky valleys and out again. At one point we came out of the woods, like foraging bears, onto the gravel verge of a paved logging road. The Milky Way wheeled overhead, and just then a logging truck came swinging around the curve all running lights and exhaust, a huge roar after the black, silent woods. Legend, and the Expediciones brochure, hold that on summer nights jaguars have been spotted crossing the road: that a logging truck driver or driver with a bus full of snoozing passengers running up from the coast glimpses just the hint of a long, black form slinking over the verge. Adelfo just laughs at the idea.

I was gasping bent over with my hands on my knees and staggering across the gravel to keep up with Brian and Adelfo who strode down the shoulder and dove into the woods. We charged off into the bracken down invisible paths, dashing up slopes, veering down goat paths. We skirted along mossy ledges our backs grating against granite and rare ferns. The dark was thinning and the woods were now full of long swaths of fog.

This path that wends along windy ridges and gurgling brooks is the same path through these mountains, more or less, that the Aztecs and Zapotecs trotted along the 150 miles to the Pacific for cacao and back again to market in the Oaxaca valley and beyond, as far as Tabasco on the Carribean. Seven hundred years later, the trail, the market, and the people are all still here. This is a well-lived-in forest, but again and again we are surprised when, in what we took to be the middle of nowhere, a barbed wire fence or a gate appeared. Lickety split we clambered over fences on jagged stiles of made of half a pine log with notched steps hacked in the round face. Rail gates were made so the top rails slide handily out of the upright to let you, but not the cows, through. Adelfo vaulted the rails, hauled them down, we hopped over, and he shoved them home. I got the feeling that if we’d paused, he would have flung us over like a porter loading luggage.

Because we were so helplessly lost, Brian and I simultaneously considered that, if Adelfo wanted to murder us right then and there, he could have. Strip us of our granola and Minoltas and who would be the wiser. Too, if a soggy ledge crumbled from under his Nikes (misprinted on the heel as Mikes) and down he plummeted into the bottomless, green, and lovely maw of this silent valley, we’d be equally sunk. Then, abashed, we concentrated on the really amazing beauty of the temperate rainforest around us, smiled winningly at Adelfo, and hurried along because now the dark was really ebbing.

There are eight ancient and communally governed little towns that make up the Sierra Norte. Ten years ago, the trend in these hills was to mow down the woods, sell the lumber, pitch heritage and ancestral ties to family and land, and move to Mexico City or Chicago. Unhappy with those prospects, the town elders got together and decided they ought to figure out ways to manage the forests sustainably. First things first: they set up a Web site and opened the office of Expediciones de Sierra Norte in the city. They began bottling spring water, growing and collecting other non-timber forest products like mushrooms and walnuts, and they invited people up to take a look around. They were selling the forest, without selling the forest.

And it seems to be working. Vacationing botanists came and catalogued the ferns, mountain bikers came from Italy and Spain hauling Mongooses and Rock Hoppers, hikers and birders roamed the piney trails and waved to surprised farmers weeding their potato fields on the hillsides. Foresters came and gave advice about tree care and harvesting, and deer management; herbalists came and documented medicinal and culinary herbs; folklorists came to write down the stories people in the little towns tell about the forest. The eight towns have been managing the forests communally since the 1300’s. They know a lot about their forest and one thing they know is it’s fragile. Every visitor is required to sign up, usually at the office in Oaxaca city and hire a guide like Adelfo. A guide costs $12.00 for the day and $5.00 extra to see the sun come up, and right that minute it was.

At that minute too, as if on cue, the path halted abruptly at the foot of a huge mossy karst tower that rocketed out of the forest like a barnacled whale. We were there. Clambering straight up its flanks the last hundred yards was a slope of crunchy fern and bracken. Scaling it was like stomping through salad. In cloud, we scrambled and panted up through purple dahlias bobbing among ferns. A moss the color of limes splotched the sharp, porous rock and what appeared to be licheny, granitic knobs covering it turned out to be little spiny cactuses.

And the sun came boiling up like Poseidon from the sea, the clouds below us like lather, churning around in the magnificent valleys, washing through the woods beneath us, rushing like foam through the woods and the tree tops poking up black like finials. I could have cried.

Adelfo pointed out that we could scale an even taller, steeper, mossier crag, although it involved leaping a gorge over some spruces. He recommended it by saying, “El caido es mortal.” “The fall is fatal.” So, we crouched on our cactusy rock and ate graham crackers in the tremendous wind.

And then the sun was up. There was the forest, rather battered in the light. Adelfo pointed out whole not-too-distant mountainsides swept by pine diseases, gnawed by beetles, and blasted by forest fires. He said, too, that, as air pollution in the valley increased, the clouds bathing the trees were becoming more of a daily toxic drench than a cleansing primordial sluice. It was still beautiful.

We clomped back to Llano Grande like horses along loamy trails through watery glens full of pale purple forest dahlias, red penestemon, mounds of lupine along the tree lines. There was some kind of a purple delphinium, coral sage blossoms the shape and size of elegant fingernails, and viscous thistles right at finger-tip height with huge Martian flowers the color of Vienna sausage.

We passed sunny little potato fields, clearings on the mountain slope, often with a little house made of split logs hewn thin like tongue depressors, even the roofs were wooden, made of long, thin slats. Adelfo, explained, “A farmer’s fields are scattered all over the mountains. He plows and plants his fields and stays a while and lives in the little house by the field. I do that every summer,” he said, striding along.

“What do you eat?” we asked.

“Well,” he said, “squirrel is good. But you must prepare squirrel by first soaking it in lime and water.” That sounded o.k., we guessed.

“What is also good,” he continued, “is a kind of rat that steals potatoes. He can also be prepared in this manner.” Adelfo seemed a little conflicted about eating the rat explaining, “It is an annoying rat, but admirable for its clever industry, working all night to stash whole fields full of potatoes in his den.”

“How clever,” we said and Adelfo continued, “We killed him with a shovel and all his children. In the hole were thousands of potatoes.”

There was a pause, then we all three laughed, probably for different reasons. Rat and potato recipes were an unexpected bonus to this trip. Adelfo showed us plants along the path that were good for hang-overs, dandruff, and to Brian he said, “And these are for passion! Heh heh heh.”

We then came onto a broad track. Cows belly deep in coreopsis and lupine nodded pleasantly at us from a meadow. Recognizing Adelfo, one ambled over, but, to save her the trip he called to her that, sorry, he didn’t have any salt, so she stopped and swung back around to the others who were watching expectantly. A man came down the track with a DeWalt chainsaw on his shoulder, and we were back in Llano Grande at the little smoky comedor cabina for scrambled eggs, chicken stuffed tortillas, apple marmalade, and hot chocolate in thick white bowls.