A 17-minute drive north of Guadalajara brings you to a veritable Forest of Giants: monster rocks covering a steep hillside which rises high above the placid village of Río Blanco. The place was long ago given the name El Diente in honor of one particular tooth-shaped rock especially beloved by the boulder and mountain climbers who have been coming to Cerro El Diente for decades to hone their skills.
For many years, the only way to reach El Diente was to park at the edge of Río Blanco and hike 800 meters to the monoliths. Then local entrepreneurs decided to build a road right up to the foot of the rocks and to charge a toll for access to their bumpy, dusty, rut-ridden camino. As a result of this one act, hordes of “domingueros” (sunday picnickers) descended upon El Diente once a week, strewing garbage everywhere and shattering the former stillness of this magical place with ear-splitting noise from stereos jacked up to full volume. Some of them even wandered away from their cars to scrawl graffiti all over the rocks, up to as high as they could reach on tiptoe.
The bad news doesn’t end here. Recently it was discovered that developers have bought up all the land around the monoliths and plan to carpet the area with 26,000 houses, cutting off all access to what could be a wonderful park. Local climbers decided it was time to take action. A movement called “Salva El Diente” was born.
“I have been climbing El Diente for 20 years, and I saw the drastic change,” says Oscar Gonzalez, one of the founders of Salva El Diente. “You see, I have two kids and one day I asked myself, ‘What am I going to leave them?’ My friends Ricardo Ramos and Gerardo the Fish felt the same way, so the first thing we did was to start a legal association because we discovered that El Diente – which covers 1,591 hectares – is a so-called protected area at the municipal level, but the money allocated for maintaining it had never been spent because no organization had ever asked for it.”
“In the world of climbers,” reminisces González, “El Diente holds a special place. It was here where the first International Bouldering Championships were held in 1985. Participants from Japan, England, Peru, Venezuela, the United States and Mexico were amazed at the endless variety of climbing situations they could try out on these strangely shaped monoliths and ever since it has been the favorite place for local climbers to practice. However, the aim of our organization goes beyond this. We think El Diente should be a park which everyone can enjoy, a place where families can have fun, a place for hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding. And, of course, we shouldn’t forget that this forested area is another of the ‘lungs’ of Guadalajara along with La Primavera and Colomos.”
To get a feeling for the rock climbers’ concerns, I went to El Diente on a weekday to have a good look around. Even though it’s only an eight-kilometer drive from the Periferico, in bygone times you needed a high-clearance vehicle to reach the place. No More. Now it’s paved road all the way to Río Blanco. From here you can walk to the rocks without charge or pay 30 pesos for the privilege of driving 800 meters more on the ill-maintained dirt road.
While in the past I’ve always gone to El Diente to watch climbers scale the rocks, this time my friends and I decided simply to wander around. This turned into a real eye-opener. With every step one of us would cry out: “This place is incredible; it’s astounding!” And over and over we would point: “Look at those rocks: two giant turtles; over there, you can see a brontosaurus and here’s a giant finger pointing at the sky.”
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