California to Panama in a T100

From San Blas we drove up to Mazatlan, then headed inland on rout 666. aka "the devil's backbone" This is a popular road for motorcycles to drive due to the long winding climb through the mountains.
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We pulled off to camp in Mexiquillo. There were a bunch of trails to drive in the beautiful mountains and we found out the next day that it is an OHV area when the local Jeep club from Durango showed up.
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This is where we camped next to a small lake. You can see the offroad lights from the jeep club finding camp.
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Our next stop was Parque Nacional Siera de Organos. This place had some easy hikes through the awesome rock formations, clean camping, and we were the only ones camped there.DSC00400.JPG

We got to camp right amongst the rocks.IMG_6710.JPG

From here we headed to the Copper Canyon. Our first stop was Guachochi, where we camped at an awesome spot with a gazebo with a fire place at the bottom of a rocky dirt road next to a creek and waterfalls. We heard that you had to hike to this spot but 4low got us there and it was great.

the road in

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camp
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Jaeger enjoying the fire
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On the way out
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Batopilas was our next destination. It was a long windy decent to get there and it tool a lot of patience to avoid burning up the brakes.
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When we arrived we found out that there was no where to stay with secure parking. Normally that would just mean that we had to find a business that would let us use there restroom and we would camp on the street, but for some reason we both got a bad feeling about staying in this town. Maybe it was because there was a charity organization in town and that brought in a bunch of the surrounding villagers. Maybe it was the looks we were getting from the "mechanics" that looked a lot more like chop shops. Maybe it was the looks from the truck load of heavily armed young men as we entered town and the fact that they followed us around for a little bit. Nothing happened, but we didn't like the vibe, so we left.
Our plan was to drive the dirt track that goes over the ridge and into the neighboring, deeper canyon and the town of Urique. We didn't have enough day light left to do this, so we drove about 1.5 hours out onto the dirt road and found a spot to camp.
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We were still feeling nervous. We know this is a heavy drug cartel area and it must have been playing with our heads a bit. We spent an uneventful night camped here and proceeded to Urique the next morning.
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This road proved to be one of the more challenging of the trip with steep inclines and declines, tight turns, and lots of rain ruts and loos rock.
Our next stop was Creel. This is an interesting little tourist town with and old west feel. It is known as the place to get on the train that takes you along the canyon with spectacular views. Seeing as how we just drove through the canyon, we skipped the train ride and headed to the Basasichi waterfall. This extremely long water fall in a beautiful pine forest has some nice hiking trails and lookouts to enjoy. We spent the day there and camped in the parking lot.IMG_7208.JPG
 
From Cascada Basasichi we headed north. We didn't have a destination in mind, basically just trying to make miles.
We ended up crossing the border into the USA after about 10 hours of travel. We had been out of the country for 498 days.
Entering the USA was extremely easy. We used the Agua Prieta/Douglas crossing and entered into Arizona after waiting in the line of cars for about an hour.
It was so easy and different from the borders that we had grown used to that we entered the US without cancelling our Mexican vehicle import permit. We asked the US border agent where we could cancel our tip. After some explanation of what we were trying to do he responded "I don't know nothing 'bout what they do over there" and informed us that he has never been to Mexico and had several follow up questions about us going to Panama like, "That's just a thing you do?"
ahh, back in the good ol' USA.
We checked our calendar and decided not to worry about the vehicle import permit since we planned to be back in Baja before it would expire. we carried on into Arizona a short ways before finding a national forest to sleep in.
 

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