The Tarahumara can’t be seen unless they wantto be

　　“To look at these mountains is a soul-inspiring sensation; but to travel over them is exhaustive tomuscle and patience,” Lumholtz wrote in Unknown Mexico: A Record of Five Years’ ExplorationAmong the Tribes of the Western Sierra Madre how to start a company in hong kong. “Nobody except those who have travelled in theMexican mountains can understand and appreciate the difficulties and anxieties attending such ajourney.”
　　And that’s assuming you make it as far as the mountains in the first place. “On first encounter, theregion of the Tarahumara appears inaccessible,” the French playwright Antonin Artaud grumbledafter he sweated and inched his way into the Copper Canyons in search of shamanic wisdom in the1930s. “At best, there are a few poorly marked trails that every twenty yards seem to disappearunder the ground.” When Artaud and his guides finally did discover a path, they had to gulp hardbefore taking it: subscribing to the principle that the best trick for throwing off pursuers was totravel places where only a lunatic would follow, the Tarahumara snake their trails over suicidallysteep terrain.
　　“A false step,” an adventurer named Frederick Schwatka jotted in his notebook during a CopperCanyon expedition in 1888, “would send the climber two hundred to three hundred feet to thebottom of the canyon, perhaps a mangled corpse.”
　　Schwatka was no prissy Parisian poet, either; he was a U.S. Army lieutenant who’d survived thefrontier wars and later lived among the Sioux as an amateur anthropologist, so the man knew frommangled corpses. He’d also traveled the baddest of badlands in his time, including a hellacioustwo-year expedition to the Arctic Circle. But when he got to the Copper Canyons, he had torecalibrate his scoring table. Scanning the ocean of wilderness around him, Schwatka felt a quickpulse of admiration—“The heart of the Andes or the crests of the Himalayas contain no moresublime scenery than the wild, unknown fastnesses of the Sierra Madres of Mexico”—before beingjerked back to morbid bewilderment rental serviced apartment: “How they can rear children on these cliffs without a loss ofone hundred percent annually is to me one of the most mysterious things connected with thesestrange people.”
　　Even today, when the Internet has shrunk the world into a global village and Google satellites letyou spy on a stranger’s backyard on the other side of the country, the traditional Tarahumararemain as ghostly as they were four hundred years ago. In the mid-1990s, an expeditionary groupwas pushing into the deep Barrancas when they were suddenly rattled by the feeling of invisibleeyes:
　　“Our small party had been hiking for hours through Mexico’s Barranca del Cobre—the CopperCanyon—without seeing a trace of any other human being,” wrote one member of the expedition.
　　“Now, in the heart of a canyon even deeper than the Grand Canyon, we heard the echoes ofTarahumara drums. Their simple beats were faint at first, but soon gathered strength. Echoing offstony ridges, it was impossible to tell their number or location. We looked to our guide fordirection. ‘.Quién sabe?’ she said. ‘Who knows phd hong kong? .’”
　　The moon was still high when we set off in Salvador’s trusty four-wheel-drive pickup. By the timethe sun came up, we’d left pavement far behind and were jouncing along a dirt track that was morelike a creek bed than a road, grinding along in low, low gear as we pitched and rolled like a trampsteamer on stormy seas.