Basaseachic Falls is the tallest waterfall in Mexico that runs all year, a single leap of 246 metres off the rim of a canyon in the Sierra Madre Occidental of Chihuahua state, in the pine country of the Rarámuri, and it is watched from an overlook at the lip, where the water peels off the cliff and turns to mist before it reaches the floor, or from the pool at the bottom after a steep climb down. The fall is the Basaseachic river dropping into the Candameña canyon, and the walk from the road is short: a path through pine and oak to the top of the fall, where the river slides over the rock and vanishes, and on to the La Ventana lookout on the canyon wall opposite, from which the whole column is seen from head to foot with the canyon opening below it. The trail down is a set of switchbacks to the base, an hour of hard walking each way, ending at a cold pool ringed by boulders in the shade of the cliffs, where the fall lands in spray and wind.
The country around it is the Sierra Tarahumara, the homeland of the Rarámuri, known as some of the great long-distance runners of the world; their villages and log cabins lie in the pine forest around the park, and they sell baskets of pine needle and sotol at the trailheads. The forest above the canyon is walked on trails away from the rim, cool and resin-scented, with cliffs and rock towers appearing between the trees, and in the same canyon system a second fall, Piedra Volada, is taller still but flows only after rain. From July to September, after the summer rains, the fall runs heaviest, rainbows hang in the spray and the canyon fills with a low roar; in the dry spring it thins to a white thread. Basaseachic is a river that steps off a cliff, and the canyon it made is the country of runners.