4th Time's the Charm: Climbing El Potrero Chico and Road-Tripping to Punta de Mita
From a Border Office Standoff in Coahuila to a Music Video Shoot in Nayarit — This Is the Mexico Trip That Finally Worked
There is a specific kind of humility that comes from being turned away at the same international border twice. The first time, the Mexican border officer at Piedras Negras informed us that Base Camp — our converted school bus, our beloved rolling home — was registered as a "bus" and therefore could not receive a Temporary Import Permit (TIP). "No se puede," she said, with the serene finality of someone who has delivered this news before and is entirely comfortable delivering it again. We drove thousands of miles back to Maine to re-register it as an RV. We spent a summer working. We came back.
The second time was the same office, definitely the same officer, who climbed aboard, pointed at the word "BUS" stamped into the VIN plate riveted to the steel paneling above the driver's seat, and handed us back our paperwork.
The lesson, it turned out, was not "get better paperwork." The lesson was "try Ciudad Acuña."
Ciudad Acuña is 90 minutes northwest of Piedras Negras, and has a single-story Banjercito office that Base Camp can pull directly up to. The woman there reviewed our documents. At one point she took them to the jefe in the back cubicle. He glanced out the window at Base Camp. He nodded. She processed our payment. We had our TIP in under 30 minutes. After two failed attempts, several thousand miles of detour, and one Maine summer, we were in.
I kept glancing over my shoulder across the hall through the glass windows of the Banjercito office, waiting for a phone call to come in about a school bus attempting to cross in an "if Mom says No, go ask Dad" fashion. It did not come. We got our FMM tourist stamps, and pointed Base Camp south.
Mexico was finally ours. All 1.97 million square kilometers of it. We aimed for the first 760 or so, toward a canyon in Nuevo León that Kai had been dreaming about since he first opened a climbing guidebook.
El Potrero Chico: The Yosemite of Mexico (With Better Tamales)
El Potrero Chico is a limestone canyon on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, just outside the small town of Hidalgo in Nuevo León — about 45 minutes northwest of Monterrey. The name means "The Little Corral," which is modest to the point of deception. It is one of the largest sport climbing destinations in North America, with over 650 bolted routes, more than 140 of them multipitch, on walls of featured limestone that rise hundreds of meters from the canyon floor. Alex Honnold free-soloed its crown jewel, El Sendero Luminoso, a 15-pitch 5.12d that he presumably found somewhat more manageable than we would. We had not come for Sendero Luminoso. We had come because a father, a mother, and their three boys can find a week's worth of climbing here without ever repeating themselves, at grades that are challenging and rewarding without requiring the specific neural architecture of Alex Honnold.
We set up at Finca El Caminante, a guesthouse in the canyon with a level pad for Base Camp's substantial footprint and a view of the walls that made you want to lace your shoes the moment you woke up. Which is, it turns out, exactly what we did.
Supernova: The Pre-Dawn Edition
It was Kai's idea. I agreed enthusiastically and began worrying immediately. Supernova is an eight-pitch 5.11a tucked into the back of Estrellita Canyon — a route that follows a waterfall-like curtain of featured limestone straight to a summit with views of the entire Potrero valley. From the road it looks blank and vertical and vaguely threatening. From the guidebook, it looks like something that two people who know what they're doing should consider attempting in good conditions, having eaten a proper breakfast, starting early enough to be well clear of the route before anyone else has reason to be there.
Kai and I woke up before dawn, ate granola, racked up in headlamps, and started hiking in the dark. The original plan had been Satori, a 5.10c ridge-line route, but the day had arrived windy and misty — unusual weather for the desert. Supernova is protected by the canyon walls. The conditions were perfect, and we were the first ones there.
By mid-route we were above the mist, on sun-warmed limestone, with the canyon spreading below us and the Sierra Madre fading into the distance. Kai led pitches at the top of the grade with the confidence of someone who has been doing this since he could tie a figure-eight, which is accurate. I belayed him and did the mental arithmetic that all climbing parents do: the bolt is right there, the rock is solid, this is fine. It was fine. It was better than fine. We topped out on a summit I don't have sufficient words to describe, and sat there for a while, not talking, because there was nothing to add.
Eight pitches of 5.11a. Pre-dawn start. Kai leading from the sharp end. One of the better days I have had on a rope.
Rampage Shenanigans: Cove's Route
While Kai and I were conducting our pre-dawn summiting operations, Cove was cultivating his own relationship with the rock. His route of choice: Rampage Shenanigans — a name that tells you everything you need to know about how the day went. Cove, at this point, had been climbing long enough to have preferences: he liked movement, he liked pumpy sequences, and he had zero interest in anything that could be described as "moderate." Rampage Shenanigans delivered. There was much commentary from the belay. There were moments that looked, from below, like interpretive dance on vertical limestone. He got up it.
The belay banter on this route alone was worth the drive from Maine.
Aguja del Cielo: The Family Route
Aguja del Cielo — the Needle of the Sky — is one of those routes that deserves its name. It is a slender limestone spire with four routes ranging from 5.10 to 5.12, and the summit involves standing on a platform so narrow you feel as though the rock is making a philosophical point about your relationship to the void. We chose the 5.11a line, which features an overhanging crux with holds that require a precise discussion between your fingertips and the limestone. The second bolt is an adventure to clip. The second pitch is a clean 5.10b. By the third pitch you are on a good ledge between two spires, wondering how you got here and whether it counts as brave or just impractical.
Other climbers on the ledge had strung aerialist silks between the spires and were practicing aerial dance moves several hundred feet above the canyon floor. Potrero Chico is that kind of place. While we were quietly trying not to drop anything important, someone nearby was rehearsing a cirque act. We got all five family members up and down the spire in an afternoon, which the other climbers found improbable enough to mention. Kai topped out the final pitch up the smaller spire — 5.10c, thin holds, the whole spire apparently contemplating its next move — and rappelled back to us with the expression of someone who knows they did something real.
Fun fact: El Potrero Chico sits at about 1,800 feet elevation in the Chihuahuan Desert, which keeps temperatures manageable. The canyon itself is a city park for Hidalgo, meaning it has an unusual dual identity as both a municipal recreation area and a world-class climbing venue. You can walk from the park's pool complex, with your large plastic pitcher of celery garnished Micheladaa — I’m not recommending you do this, but many see it as a right of passage — up to 15-pitch big wall without leaving the park boundaries. Alex Honnold free-soloed El Sendero Luminoso here — a 12-pitch route with crux pitches at 5.12d — which put the canyon on the global climbing radar. We are not Alex Honnold. We found this fact entirely acceptable.
Rest Days: Market Town, Tamale Economics, and the Beer Bottle Business
Rest days in Hidalgo meant market day, and market day meant tamales, gorditas, and alotes. The town of Hidalgo, just outside the park entrance, holds a weekly market that functions as a food court, social event, used goods emporium, and — with an enthusiasm that can only be described as culturally significant — a bingo tent. Mexicans approach bingo with the focused intensity of people who have identified it as a competitive sport. The caller works the room like a revival preacher. The crowd responds. There is money involved, but it seems almost secondary to the theater of it. We watched from the periphery, entirely unsure of the rules and unwilling to find out the hard way.
The tamales, however, we understood completely. Fresh, cheap, extraordinary — the kind of tamales that make you recalibrate every expectation you had about what food can be. Cove, who has a statistician's relationship with money, spent considerable time at one of the stalls working out the mathematics of tamale consumption. His conclusion: if you ate three tamales per meal, three meals a day, for an entire year, the cost in pesos would translate to an annual food budget so modest it would make most American school cafeterias look like fine dining. He presented these findings to the family with the satisfaction of someone who has solved a significant problem. The problem of whether we should eat three tamales per meal, per person was not examined. It was assumed.
Meanwhile, the boys had identified a commercial opportunity. Mexican beer bottles, it turns out, can be returned for a small deposit — a few pesos apiece. The campsite and surrounding area had a sufficient supply of empty bottles to make this worth pursuing. A collection route was established. Bottles were gathered, sorted, and transported to the nearest tienda for redemption.
The enterprise had two complications. First: Mexican street dogs. Every Mexican town of any size maintains a semi-feral dog population that roams freely, operates on its own social hierarchy, and takes a dim view of three foreign boys carrying rattling bags of glass through their territory. The dogs did not attack. They conveyed, through posture and sustained eye contact, that the boys' presence was being assessed on an ongoing basis. Operations were conducted accordingly — quickly, with peripheral awareness.
Second complication: glass bottles are fragile. Some did not survive the collection process in the condition in which they would be accepted at the tienda. The margin on this venture was always thin. After street-dog attrition and breakage loss, the net revenue was best understood as an educational experience rather than a retirement strategy.
The Water Park in the Mountains: A Night of Entirely Unsupervised Fun
The drive from El Potrero Chico toward the Pacific coast cuts through the Sierra Madre Occidental — a mountain crossing that produces some of the most spectacular and underappreciated driving in Mexico. The road climbs into pine forests and cloud cover, drops through river valleys, passes villages where the elevation and the century both feel uncertain. It is beautiful, occasionally terrifying, and entirely unlike the flat desert we had come from.
Somewhere in the mountains — at a property whose specific coordinates I have helpfully failed to document, which is in keeping with the general organizational standard of our expeditions — we found a water park. Not open to the public in the way water parks are normally open to the public. We had arranged to camp there overnight. The slides were empty. The pumps were off. The whole apparatus of summer fun was standing by in the dark, slides spiraling down into still pools, pipe structures echoing, the mountain air cool enough to make the whole enterprise feel slightly surreal.
So naturally we ran feral through it.
The slides were magnificent in the dark — fast, blind, loud in the enclosed tubes with a reverberation that suggested they were not acoustically designed with nighttime use in mind. The boys climbed through the slides repeatedly, their voices vanishing into the tubes.. I watched from the bottom for a while, then had what I will charitably call a Parenting Inspiration.
I climbed back up one of the dark enclosed caverns, positioned myself in the tube, and waited. The boys came down together. When the they got close I deployed what I believed was a reasonably controlled scare — a sudden noise, a grab at the dark. What I had not fully modeled was the acoustic geometry of a water slide tube at night. The screams that funneled towards me through that slide could have registered on seismic equipment. My own hearing took approximately four days to fully recover. The boys, to their credit, immediately recognized that they had the upper hand, recruited each other, and proceeded to lie in wait at various tunnel exits to return the favor. It escalated, as these things do.
The water park also featured a concrete three-story pirate ship — the kind of structure that communicates, through its design and the wear patterns of the concrete, that Mexican safety standards for play equipment are a philosophical proposition rather than a regulatory framework. The ship had giant windows — gaping openings with no glass, just air — at knee level on the upper decks, through which a person of average adult height standing normally could, if they misjudged a step, topple two stories to the rocks below. I pointed this out to the boys. They noted it and continued. Heidi noted it and suggested we stay aware. We stayed aware. Nobody fell. You don't make it far traveling in Mexico without developing a functional relationship with that particular kind of situational awareness.
Through the Heart of Guadalajara (Accidentally, Illegally, and at Great Personal Cost)
Guadalajara is Mexico's second-largest city, with a population of approximately five million people and a road network that, in its central corridors, is closed to vehicles exceeding a certain size. This includes trucks, large buses, and — it turns out — converted school buses from Maine operated by Americans who thought the GPS route looked fine.
I should clarify: we did not plan to drive through the heart of Guadalajara. The GPS planned it. We executed it. There is a meaningful distinction here that I would like the record to reflect.
By the time it became clear that we were on a road we had no business being on — narrow, historic, lined with the kind of colonial architecture that goes back to the 1700s, flanked by pedestrians and taxis and motorcycles and the full human density of Mexico's second city — we were committed. You cannot reverse a 35-foot school bus through the historic center of Guadalajara. You can only go forward and hope.
A police truck materialized behind us. It followed for several blocks with the patient, unhurried manner of a vehicle that knows it has the law on its side and is simply waiting for an opportunity to exercise it. The opportunity, however, never materialized. The traffic was too dense. Every intersection was a negotiation between our turning radius and the available width of the road. The police car could not get past us, could not pull us over, and — I would like to believe — eventually concluded that the administrative processing of a tourist in a school bus would be more trouble than the infraction warranted.
We emerged on the other side of Guadalajara's centro some indeterminate time later — it felt like a geological epoch — onto a road we were permitted to be on, with the police car nowhere to be seen.
Practical note for anyone planning to drive a large vehicle through Mexico: Guadalajara, like many Mexican cities, has specific restricted zones for vehicles over certain dimensions, typically called "Prohibido el Paso" routes for large vehicles. GPS applications do not reliably observe these restrictions. Cross-reference with a current map of restricted truck routes. Learn from our experience without having to live it.
Punta de Mita: Where the Rich People's Beach Has a Back Door
Punta de Mita occupies a 1,500-acre peninsula on the north end of Banderas Bay in Nayarit, surrounded on three sides by the Pacific Ocean. It is home to the Four Seasons and the St. Regis, two Jack Nicklaus golf courses, and a real estate market that, according to one account, attracted Bill Gates to spend $200 million on a resort acquisition in 2014. It is, in other words, the kind of place where money goes to feel more comfortable than it does at the office.
We parked Base Camp in a small campground — not inside the gated resort complex, which would have required a net worth we had not yet achieved — and discovered that this distinction matters less than the resort brochures imply. The town's public beach is right there. The coastal rocks are right there. And the path to La Lancha, one of the best surf breaks on the bay, runs right through the landscape of manicured resort perimeters and private security — present on the ridges, watching with the polished discretion of people who are paid to be unobtrusive — without actually being closed to anyone willing to walk it.
There is something particularly satisfying about walking the beach past a row of four-star resorts on your way to a surf break, with three children in tow, carrying boards, and paying nothing. We did this with some regularity. Security remained on the ridges. We remained on the public beach. Both parties maintained this arrangement with mutual professionalism.
The Music Video
One afternoon at La Lancha, a film crew arrived. Professional camera equipment, lighting rigs, a playback system, and the particular organized chaos of a small production on location. The artist was Lefy SM, a Mexican reggaeton and Latin trap artist, shooting the video for his track "Buena Vida" — a song whose title, as we could see from the production setup, was being interpreted literally: beautiful beach, Pacific light, everything arranged to look like the ideal version of a life being lived at maximum ease.
Our boys were in the background. On their boards. In the surf. As the cameras rolled on whatever foreground action the director had staged, there were three kids riding waves behind the frame, entirely uncurated and impossible to ask to leave because they were on a public beach in their own ocean. Later we saw that the video editor earned his pesos, and blurred them right out of the background. Lefty had La Lancha all to himself for the final cut of "Buena Vida.” But they were there, and the waves did not pause for the production schedule, and Lefy SM's crew appeared, after initial assessment, to find this acceptable.
The boys, for their part, were entirely unbothered. They had surf. Everything else was context.
The Volunteer (Legally Questionable, Nutritionally Excellent)
Kai ended up helping out at a local juice stand, somewhere between tourist and apprentice, learning the rhythm of the operation with the adaptability of a kid who has been dropped into enough unfamiliar contexts to know that participation is better than watching.
There was, briefly, the matter of legality.
“Kai,” we said, attempting to sound like responsible adults, “you can’t actually work here.”
He considered this for a moment, then nodded in a way that suggested the issue had already been resolved internally.
“I’m not working,” he said. “I’m volunteering.”
And that was that—the kind of airtight logic that has powered entire economies.
The stand belonged to a mama and abuelita (grandmother). They set up each day in front of their house with the quiet efficiency of people who have done something so often it no longer requires discussion. It was, frankly, a better-run operation than most small businesses I’ve encountered, including several that had access to spreadsheets.
Every morning, before we even woke, Kai would slip out of his bunk aboard BaseCamp and head across the street to help them set up. This involved hauling crates of fruit, unfolding tables, lugging drinking water, erecting a tent, and—most impressively—watering the dirt road to keep the dust down, which is the sort of detail that separates amateurs from professionals.
By the time we stumbled into consciousness, he was already several hours into his “volunteer” shift, juicing oranges at a rate that suggested a personal vendetta against citrus.
“They use way more orange juice than water,” he reported, with the authority of someone who had seen behind the curtain.
He also translated for passing tourists, bridging the gap between “What is this?” and “Yes, I’ll take two,” with the calm confidence of a man who had fully committed to his role in an organization that did not technically employ him.
In return, he was paid in the most effective currency available: a deluxe breakfast, on the house, and the freshest smoothie imaginable—thick, cold, and improbably alive with flavor, as if the fruit had been waiting its entire existence for this moment.
The women adored him.
This was evident not just in the extra portions or the easy laughter, but in the way he was folded into the routine—no longer a visitor, not quite family, but something adjacent and welcome.
On his last night in Punta de Mita, they took him out to dinner, which felt less like a thank-you and more like a quiet acknowledgment that something real had happened in the space between transactions.
The next morning, as we prepared to leave, Kai looked back toward the stand, already being set up without him.
“I just hate the idea of those two hauling all that out of the house alone,” he said.
Which is how you know the arrangement had been exactly what he claimed all along.
Not work.
Just showing up.
During our time in Punta de Mita, a fair arrived. Not a polished destination fair with liability insurance and a safety rating. A Mexican town fair — the kind that materializes in a plaza over a weekend, fills the air with music at a volume that suggests the speakers were designed for outdoor stadium use, and operates on the collective assumption that the community knows itself well enough to manage without excessive intervention.
Base Camp rocked all weekend on a low frequency bass register. Not because we were close to the main stage. Because the entire town was within the high decibel radius.
The attractions were remarkable. There was a jumping house — a multi-level bouncy structure, several stories tall, packed beyond anything that an insurance adjuster would have approved, structurally inventive in ways that were best not examined from the outside. Children went in and emerged at irregular intervals from various exit points. The engineering relationship between the upper floors and the lower floors was a matter of ongoing negotiation with physics. Nobody seemed concerned. We applied the same standard we had used at the concrete pirate ship in the mountains: awareness, trust in the culture's collective experience, and the knowledge that Mexico has been doing this longer than we've been watching.
Adjacent to the jumping house was a booth where you could pay a modest number of pesos to throw rocks at a pyramid of stacked beer bottles. Not rubber balls — rocks. The kind of rocks you find on the ground nearby. The bottles were real glass. The ground for a considerable radius was carpeted in broken glass, which the booth operator had apparently decided was simply the natural terrain of the booth's immediate environment. Young children played here. Grandmothers watched from folding chairs. The operator was approximately twelve years old, with the street-sharp confidence of someone who had been running commercial operations since well before they could legally do so. He collected pesos with the practiced efficiency of a boy who knew exactly what he was doing and had no interest in your thoughts about it.
Nearby, at a coin-flipping gambling table, small children and grandmothers played side by side — the children for the novelty of money, the grandmothers presumably for more considered reasons. The music shook everything, all weekend, the bass finding its way through every wall and sleeping surface and conversation.
It was, without qualification, one of the most interesting fairs we have ever attended. The absence of liability paperwork was a feature, not a bug.
The Carniceria
We passed Silvestre’s carnicería every day, which is how routines begin in places where you have no business having routines.
The shop sat right on the dirt road, announcing itself not with a sign but with a large, unapologetic vat of boiling pig fat positioned out front like a civic monument. This was where Silvestre—middle-aged, perpetually smiling, and entirely unfazed by heat that could melt ambition—made chicharrón with the calm authority of a man who has long since stopped questioning his life choices.
We went for chorizo. That was the official reason. We told ourselves this daily, as if we were sensible people conducting sensible errands.
The boys made a friend. His name was Sylvestre, and he occupied that specific category of local kid—present, observant in the practical sense, entirely at ease in spaces that confused us—who makes a family trip click into place.
Kai, ever the diplomat, established an economy. He would buy a mango for himself, and one for Silvestre. Silvestre would return the favor with meat—first chicharrón, hot and shatteringly crisp, then increasingly ambitious selections: tripe, gizzards, liver, and other items that seemed less like food and more like a test of character.
Silvestre beamed through all of it, handing over bags of mysterious parts with a wide grin, clearly delighted by the exchange. He was a happy man. The boys had made a friend. And we, somehow, had become regulars—people who stopped daily at a roadside vat of boiling pig fat for sausage and life lessons.
We came for chorizo.
We left with something much harder to explain.
Jackfruit, or: The Fruit That Fights Back
The jackfruit, for the record, was everywhere—enormous green cannonballs hanging from roadside trees, stacked like unexploded ordnance at market stalls, and being methodically dismantled by people who clearly understood what they were dealing with.
Because jackfruit is not a casual fruit.
At its best, it’s extraordinary: sweet, tropical, somewhere between pineapple, banana, and something faintly floral that refuses to be pinned down. Each bulb is golden and glossy, neatly wrapped around a seed like nature briefly considered making candy and then got distracted.
At its worst—or rather, at its most honest—it is a 20-pound lesson in consequences.
The first thing you notice is the smell: rich, sweet, slightly fermented, as if the fruit is already halfway to becoming something else. The second thing you notice is the sap. Jackfruit bleeds a thick, white latex that adheres instantly to knives, hands, cutting boards, and, if you are careless, your sense of optimism. The boys looked like Aussie surfers with zinced lips, and there was little mystery in what they had been eating.
Locals deal with this by oiling their knives beforehand, which is the kind of practical wisdom you only acquire after ruining several perfectly good knives and possibly a relationship.
We, naturally, did not know this.
What followed was less “fruit preparation” and more “adhesive experiment.” The knife stuck. My hands stuck. At one point, I was reasonably certain I had bonded permanently to a cutting surface and would need to be explained to future guests as part of the kitchen.
Cleaning it off required oil, patience, and a willingness to accept that some things are now just slightly sticky forever.
This is, incidentally, why fresh jackfruit from a Pacific coast market stand is a different creature entirely from the canned product you find in the United States, which arrives pre-sanitized, de-sapped, and stripped of all personality—like a fruit that has been through a corporate training program.
Cove briefly considered pivoting the family business from beer bottle redemption to jackfruit distribution, which would have been bold, visionary, and doomed. The logistics alone—harvesting, transporting, de-latexing an object roughly the size and temperament of a small dog—did not scale.
The Route: Potrero Chico to Punta de Mita in a School Bus
For anyone planning a similar trip, here is the rough geography of what we drove. From Hidalgo, Nuevo León (El Potrero Chico), the route southwest passes through Monterrey, then climbs into the Sierra Madre Occidental. The direct route to the Pacific coast runs through Guadalajara — Mexico's second-largest city, population 5 million, historic centro not recommended for oversized vehicles, as previously noted — and then northwest on Federal Highway 15D toward Tepic and the Nayarit coast. From Tepic, Federal Highway 200 runs south along the coast through Compostela and Las Varas to Punta de Mita on the north end of Banderas Bay. Total driving distance is roughly 1,000 km (about 620 miles), best broken into two or three days with a mountain overnight somewhere in the Sierra Madre — possibly at a water park, if you know the right people.
Punta de Mita itself sits at the same latitude as Hawaii, with average winter temperatures in the mid-70s°F. December through March is peak season — dry, warm, surf reliable, the Marietas Islands (a protected UNESCO biosphere and the location of the famous hidden beach, Playa Escondida) accessible by panga tour from El Anclote. La Lancha, the surf break south of town, is a right-hander that works best on northwest swell — a 10-15 minute walk from the road through coastal brush, accessible to anyone who shows up with a board and the willingness to navigate the trailhead.
Practical Guide: El Potrero Chico for Families
If you are bringing children to El Potrero Chico, here is what you should know going in:
Camping: Finca El Caminante is our campsite of choice — level, shaded, well-positioned in the canyon with direct views of the walls. They also have a variety of rooms. Reservations are recommended in high season (November–February). The park itself is open year-round, but winter is peak season for a reason: desert summer temperatures in Nuevo León are not academic.
The routes we recommend for capable family teams: Supernova (5.11a, 8 pitches, Estrellita Canyon — start early, the route faces east and gets sun quickly), Aguja del Cielo / El Machismo (5.11a, 3 pitches, spectacular summit, manageable for strong teen leaders), and virtually any single-pitch sector in the main canyon for warming up, projecting, or building the younglings' confidence before committing to a long day. Grades at Potrero Chico are considered stiff by North American standards — when the guidebook says 5.10, read 5.10+ and plan accordingly.
The town: Hidalgo has everything you need — food, hardware, propane, cold beverages, and a market day (typically Sundays) that will recalibrate your expectations about what tamales can be. The people of Hidalgo are, in our experience across multiple trips, genuinely warm toward visiting climbers and toward children in particular. Kai helping at the juice stand was not anomalous. It is the kind of town where that happens.
| Route | Grade | Pitches | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supernova | 5.11a | 8 | Start pre-dawn. Estrellita Canyon. Waterfall face. Summit views are worth every pitch. |
| Rampage Shenanigans | 5.11 | Multi | Pumpy. Fun. Belay banter included. Recommended for climbers with something to prove. |
| Aguja del Cielo / El Machismo | 5.11a | 3 | Needle spire summit. Overhanging crux. Commitment required. Worth it entirely. |
| Estrellita | 5.10c | 12 | Classic moderate big day. Ridgeline finish. Popular — start early or midweek. |
Final Thoughts: What the Fourth Time Gets You
What the fourth trip gets you, after two failed border attempts and a 6,000-mile detour to Maine and back, is a particular depth of appreciation. For the limestone. For the tamales. For the fact that the world contains a place where you can climb eight pitches before breakfast, eat three tamales per meal for a price that makes Cove's spreadsheet look optimistic, run feral through an empty water park at midnight, accidentally commit a traffic infraction in one of Mexico's largest cities and emerge unindicted, watch your boys surf in the background of a music video on a Pacific beach, and end the weekend with bass-shaken sleep next to a glass-carpeted carnival where a twelve-year-old is running a gambling ring next to someone's grandmother.
Mexico does not soften its edges for you. It does not put up liability warnings or smooth out the friction. What it offers instead is the real thing — full-contact, warm, loud, occasionally alarming, and consistently extraordinary. Our boys are growing up in it, and I think it is making them more capable humans in ways that no classroom curriculum has managed to replicate.
We'll be back for the fifth time. Base Camp's paperwork is in order. We know which border to use.
Have you climbed El Potrero Chico, survived Guadalajara in an oversized vehicle, or discovered a better tamale situation? Tell us about it in the comments. We are, as always, comparing notes.
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