Why El Paso exists at all — the Pass of the North, the natural gap where the Rio Grande cuts between two mountain ranges, funneling four hundred years and more of travelers through a single doorway.
I'm Ranger Boone Merrick, and you're looking out at a modern city of millions, but I want you to understand the one simple, ancient fact underneath all of it — the reason there is a city here at all. It's the pass. Let me tell you about the Pass of the North.
Look at the land. You've got a great mountain range on this side — the Franklins, the ones we're about to climb — and another range just across the river in Mexico, the Sierra de Juárez. Two walls of mountains. And between them, over untold ages, the Rio Grande has carved a gap — a pass, a natural doorway through the wall of mountains that stand across this whole stretch of desert. And in a harsh, dry country like this, a doorway like that is everything. If you're traveling — north or south, for thousands of years — this is where you come through. There's no easy way over the mountains; you go through the gap, along the river.
And so everyone did. For thousands of years, Native peoples' trails funneled through this pass. When the Spanish came up from Mexico, four hundred years ago, they came through here, and named it — El Paso del Norte, the Pass of the North — and ran their great royal road, the Camino Real, straight through it, a lifeline of a thousand miles between Mexico City and the far colonies of New Mexico. When the wagon trains rolled west, they came through the pass. And when the railroads spanned the continent in the eighteen-hundreds, they too had to thread this same gap — four of them, converging here.
Every single one of them — the ancient hunter, the Spanish friar, the wagon pioneer, the railroad, the modern trucker on the interstate, and you, today — came and comes through the same doorway in the mountains, for the same reason: it's the way through. That's the whole secret of El Paso. It isn't here for the river alone, or the mountains alone. It's here for the gap between them — the Pass of the North, the great doorway of the desert, that has been letting the world through for as long as there's been a world here to let through. Now let's go climb the wall it cuts through. Roll on.
Photo: Dicklyon · CC BY-SA 4.0
