Over the Mountain — the Transmountain Road

Now the real drama begins — you're leaving the flats and starting the climb up and over the Franklin Mountains themselves, on the road they call Transmountain. And this is a special drive, because these Franklins are, remarkably, the largest mountain range sitting inside the limits of any city in the United States — a genuine rugged wilderness of rock and canyon and desert, nearly twenty-seven thousand acres of it, protected as a state park, right in the middle of a metropolis of millions. You're driving from one half of the city, up over a real mountain range, and down into the other half.

Take these curves easy and use the pull-offs, because the views back over the city and the desert just get bigger as you climb. And watch the rock as the road cuts through it — because you are driving past some of the oldest stone in all of Texas. In the road-cuts here, the rock is Precambrian, more than a billion years old, laid down and then tilted up on its side when this whole range was heaved up along a great crack in the earth. These mountains are what geologists call a fault-block range — a giant block of the crust, tilted and thrust skyward as the land here slowly pulls apart. So you're climbing a tilted slab of the ancient earth, right through the heart of a modern city. Only in El Paso. Climb on up toward the pass; Boone's got the mountain's stories for you.