Durango. It’s a town, it’s a state of Mexico, it’s one big wild-west movie set, it even lent its name to a movie, and there’s a notorious John Wayne connection. There are few places more ‘cowboys and indians’ than Durango. There we were… just moseying-on through, minding our own business when the whole wild west ‘thing’ just grabbed us by surprise and got us to hang-out for a few days. Why, in the name of Duke’s boots, had we never even heard of this place before?
Sierra de los Órganos
The Organ Pipes Mountain Range does exactly what it says on the tin: tall, narrow, vertical rock formations, curiously reminiscent of… guess what? Yes, organ pipes 😊 The Sierra is actually just outside the Durango State border in Zacatecas, but it’s only an hour or so away from Durango city and it’s the first real wild west scenery that we’ve come across. It’s a small nature reserve and certainly our favourite in Mexico so far.
The climate here is perfect, there’s a great little camp area that we had all to ourselves and the scenery is so visually wild west that it has been used for Hollywood cowboy films back in the hey-day of the genre. The short hikes in the park are gentle but awesome, with a new curious rock formation to be spotted every time you raise your head from the rocky path. It’s true what they say… a picture paints a thousand words…
Chez John Wayne
Just north of Durango city where the cattle roamin’ plains meet the mountains and canyons, is La Joya Ranch. The sprawling estate used to belong to Duke himself – John Wayne. It was both a set for his film making and a personal Mexican hideaway between movies. Today it’s a remote, and therefore little visited, attraction run by the friendly Armando. There are acres and acres of landscapes, creeks and canyons to explore, where you almost expect to see a silhouette row of Sioux headdresses popping up over a distant ridge-line. The street-set is starting to get a bit run-down now and needs a bit of maintenance, but it still feels full of Hollywood history. It’s fascinating to wander the saloon and store-front facades, imagining a 1960s Wayne inimitably moseying into the saloon and challenging the baddie (always dressed in black!) to a gun-slingin’ shoot-out. Yup… a-man’s-gotta-do-whata-man’s-gotta-do.
Mexiquillo
Another fabulous small state park near Durango is Mexiquillo. Not really following the wild-west scenery theme, but here is a vast ‘stone garden’, a dense scattering of huge boulders and remarkable rock formations. We really enjoyed our time there exploring around the boulders and driving down an old railway line to some long disused tunnels cut into the side of the canyon.
Wow-Weary Theory
So if you’ve made it this far into the blog, you may have guessed that we rather liked the Durango area, particularly Sierra de los Organos. But why, we wonder, did we just happen to stumble on this place merely by good fortune? Why, in all the many discussions we’ve had with south-bound travellers over the last couple of years, did this not come up as the No.1 must-see tippety-top tip? The answer, I think, lies in my rather unscientific theory of Wow-weary Overlanding: the inevitable human propensity to judge new places by other places recently visited.
For us, having driven up from the Andes and through Central America with a never-ending string of volcanos, the mere presence of another venting volcanic cone, no matter how beautiful, strikes little more than rampant apathy into our minds. Call us spoiled, ungrateful, over-privileged, wow-weary travellers, but we lost the volcano wow-factor maybe as far back as Costa Rica.
For us, the Sierra de los Organos and the Durango wild-west is our first rocky-desert-cowboy-land and we’re blown-away by it. But what if… what if… we’d come south-bound… say from Nevada? Arizona? New Mexico? Maybe then little Los Organos park might not seem quite so impressive, eh? “Oh… another bit of John Wayne cowboy scenery… pfffft… old hat”.
So do you get my theory? As far as the whole wild-west ‘thing’ goes for the southbound overland traveller, they have recently ‘been there, seen it, done it, got the t-shirt, eaten the stew’ (so to speak). A bit of wild-west scenery no doubt strikes the same rampant apathy into their minds as we’ve been getting from volcanos. Maybe they didn’t even bother with Sierra de los Organos park. And even if they did, it was probably unremarkable by comparison the iconic wild west cowboy world of southern USA – which, by the way, they all certainly did mention 😊.
Anyway… as we explained in our last blog… we’re done with ‘mainland’ Mexico for the time being. We’re heading across the Sea of Cortez. Tune is soon to watch us fry in the mid-summer heat of Baja California.
