THE TREE AND THE MOUNTAIN
an elephant in the desert
Brief travel notes and photography.
With little chance of a wifi connection or Google Maps functioning out there, directions to the holy mountain were charmingly vague: walk out of town, through the crumbling arch, turn left at the ruined mine, follow the dry river bed to the tree (you’ll know the tree when you see it) and from there El Quemado will appear before you, an elephantine hump on the horizon.
Yes, we knew the tree when we saw it, adorned with offered trinkets (ribbons, coins, fruit, seeds…), clearly an important stop for Huichol pilgrims. When we finally made it to the top of El Quemado we met Don Pancho, a Huichol man charged with protecting this most sacred of Huichol locations. He let us into a chapel filled with animal bones, horns and antlers and explained to us that we stood there in the very birth place of the sun. Down below us spread out Wirikuta, a holy plain in which the hallucinogenic peyote grows. Huichol people may pick and consume peyote legally. Others may not. The peyote takes about eight years to grow to maturity and is less abundant than it used to be. We weren’t offered any and didn’t ask. Wirikuta is endangered by contracts granted to Canadian mining companies and industrial monocultural agriculture. Let’s hope it survives.
More travel notes and photographs coming soon.
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