AMECA, MEXICO — Hurricane Patricia, a storm of record-setting ferocity, proved no match for the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains.

Patricia smashed ashore at almost the perfect location, meteorologists and Mexican officials said Saturday, making landfall with 160-mph winds on a sparsely populated stretch of Pacific coastline and then colliding with a tall, rugged mountain range that disrupted its swirling momentum and sapped its strength.

Men remove protective wood beams from the front of a business the morning after Hurricane Patricia passed further south sparing Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on Saturday. The Associated Press

Mike Anderson of Minnesota, right, fishes alongside his friend and local fisherman Miguel Pilas during a steady rain as Hurricane Patricia approaches Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on Friday The Associated Press

Soldiers help a woman leave her flooded house in in Zoatlan, Nayarit state, about 100 miles northwest of Guadalajara, Mexico. Hurricane Patricia made landfall Friday on a sparsely populated stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast as a Category 5 storm but weakened to a tropical storm when it ran into mountains. It dumped torrential rains that authorities warned could cause deadly floods and mudslides. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

Confronted by those mountains, Patricia crumpled, rapidly shrinking from a Category 5 hurricane to a tropical depression as it limped inland. Still wary of possible flooding and landslides, Mexican officials were reluctant to “declare victory,” Transportation Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Esparza said at a Saturday news conference. But with no deaths reported and only minor damage, he said, “there was, let’s say, good fortune.”

From the beginning, Patricia has been an unusual creature. It grew astonishingly quickly at sea, at one point registering 200-mph winds – making it the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. But, in some respects, it was puny.

When Patricia arrived in Mexico, its hurricane force winds extended only 35 miles from its center and its eye was only five miles across, limiting the area impacted by its strongest force, said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Weather Service in the United States, which closely tracked the storm.

The storm also slipped neatly between two population centers, missing them both – the resort town of Puerto Vallarta to the north, and the port town of Manzanillo to the south.

“Had something like that hit a populated area like Puerto Vallarta, you would be looking at catastrophic destruction and probably fatalities,” Feltgen said in an interview. “We were very fortunate. It could have been much worse.”

On Saturday, rivers and creeks swelled and some crested their banks, causing scattered minor flooding and some property damage in the inland highlands of Jalisco, east of Puerto Vallarta. In spots, rees and boulders lay across roads where few vehicles other than phone utility trucks and the occasional military Humvee could be seen.

Yet, for the most part, the region looked more like it had been refreshed after a healthy rain than crushed by a massive storm.

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