A lumber town of a few thousand people at 2,300 metres in the Sierra Tarahumara, strung along the railway line, and the place almost everyone uses as a base for Copper Canyon.
Creel is not pretty in the way the Bajío towns are pretty. It is a working place: timber yards, a wide main street, pickup trucks, pine smoke in the cold months. What it has is position. The Chepe stops here, the roads to the canyon rim and down into it start here, and the Rarámuri communities of the surrounding sierra come here to trade.
The Rarámuri — Tarahumara in the Spanish name, though Rarámuri is what they call themselves — have lived in these canyons for centuries, and in Creel you will see them. The town's visible economy includes the sale of their pine-needle baskets and woven belts; the less visible one is that the sierra is poor and the summers have been getting drier. Buy from the makers rather than from a shop, and do not photograph people without asking.
Around town, within an hour by road or on a rented bike: the Lago de Arareco, a quiet reservoir among pines; the Valle de los Hongos and Valle de las Ranas, fields of eroded rock shaped like mushrooms and frogs; the Cusárare waterfall with a Jesuit mission church beside it; and the Recohuata hot springs at the bottom of a steep descent.
It is cold here in winter and it snows. The canyon floors, a couple of thousand metres below, are subtropical in the same week — which is the strangest thing about this part of Mexico and the reason October and November, clear at both elevations, are the months to come.