Once the haunt of Pancho Villa, Mexico's Chihuahua Desert is the largest in North America, stretching from El Paso to the pacific coast south of Mazatlan, and sandwiched between the Eastern and Western Sierra Madre. Perched on the Altiplano, the third highest inhabited plateau in the world, Chihuahua is a landscape of sand and rock blasted into surrealistic shapes by the wind, and colored by Walt Disney.
The southern part of this wind-swept wilderness is the State of Durango, once Hollywood's favorite Horse Opera location, where long shots didn't have to be painstakingly composed in order to leave out ubiquitous utility lines.
Even today, we drive long hours without seeing many signs of modern man, though ironically, it wasn't the progress of civilization into the wilderness, but the progress of the film industry, discovering computer programs that can erase anything, which ultimately did in Durango as a regular movie locale. Well, that and the fact that nobody does Westerns anymore, anyway.
Aside from abandoned movie sets still generating cash from curious tourists, the only memory left of the old days is the crumbling adobe wall of the Mexico Hotel, sporting the still legible autographs of famous movie stars once etched into patches of wet plaster. John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, and Walter Huston are some of the great names on the wall. Geezer though I am, there are also a lot of names unfamiliar to me, showing just how far back was Durango's showbiz heyday.
The Altiplano rises to more than seven-thousand feet and covers about 40% of the land surface of Mexico. Widespread depressions called bolsones contain lakes created by rainwater flowing down the mountainsides. They hold a great deal and, despite the actual scarcity of rainfall, the Altiplano has some of the most productive agricultural land in the country.
Nevertheless, the overall impression is one of barren, windswept desert; high plains stretching to the limits of vision, and you'd swear you can see Clint Eastwood, a tiny figure on his horse, drifting slowly in this immensity to another shootout with some desperadoes, living from reward to reward.
Is that whistling I hear?
The spaghetti westerns brought no rewards to the Altiplano, however. These cowboy genre revivals were filmed in Spain and Sardinia, cheap stand-ins for Mexico, by Italian studios and directors.
The plains are scattered with the ruined remnants of ancient mountain peaks, weathered into fantastic shapes and incredibly colored by their own elemental composition. Rocks containing sulfur are yellow. Copper shows its natural face in a continuum of blue and green. Reds are determined by the quantity of iron. Every element displays its own unique tincture and they're all mixed together on the palette of the Altiplano.
A lack of living things, a barren, waterless wilderness stretching away to the shimmering horizon, a merciless sun blazing down through a cloudless, pitiless sky - the desert harks back to a time before water moistened the earth and life began its evolutionary march.
Rocks piled upon rocks in painted layers; rocks flowing over other rocks like a molten river frozen in time; jagged, shark-toothed rocks tumbled about with rocks so smooth they might be made of silk; rocks of all sizes strewn at random on a vast plain, the result of some incredible ancient cataclysm.
This archetypal desertscape, with its echoes of the earliest days of creation, reaches its scenic climax at sunset.
Phantasmagorical shadows stretch far across the plain, distorted by a lowering red sun into barely recognizable copies of the landscape whose charcoal shapes they paint on the ground. The specters of gigantic buttes march like spears across the slatey bed of a valley, a mountain ridge casts its elongated image across the road like a jagged, black pit, and gradually, everything touched by the light is tinted a bright gold against whose brilliance the inky umbras deepen to ebony.
An ever-ascending series of clouds, stretched lengthwise by high winds, flames yellow, red, and gold against the indigo sky, a celestial echo of the fires burning within the rocks below. Long, golden beams of light stream out from amidst the clouds behind which a vermillion sun has sunk, lending the scene an air of spiritual awe suitable for a Biblical epic, though none was ever filmed here.
Finally, completing its journey through the day, the sun disappears completely, fallen off the horizon to tumble through the night ‘til its next appointment with the dawn, and the entire sky is afire with mutinous, burning clouds, reluctant to surrender their glory until they are, inevitably, extinguished by the overwhelming darkness; an augury of our own defiant mortality.
It's nearly dark now, and we hurry to get to our brightly lit campground before night can close her grip and entrap us on the road.
Fear of being caught out after dark spread a chilling veneer over one of our most frightening, nail biting experiences, the drive from Durango to Mazatlan high across Espinoza del Diablo, The Devil's Backbone, a narrow ridge with precipitous drops on both sides. The lack of shoulders was compounded by the fact that the road was undergoing repairs and was now a muddy, slippery mess, further complicated by the clouds we were driving through, which limited our visibility to only a few feet at best. This road is one of the greatest scenic wonders of Mexico and, at one point, the fog cleared enough so that we got a good look at the valleys falling away on either side for thousands of feet; long enough to fully appreciate the total madness of continuing. But driving one of these monsters on narrow Mexican roads at night was to be avoided at all costs, and we needed to find a campground. Only fear of the dark could trump madness.
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