Cutting the Road Through the Mountain

This smooth mountain road you're climbing didn't just happen — it was blasted, foot by foot, straight through a mountain, and it changed the whole shape of the city. Let me tell you about the day they decided to cut El Paso's mountain in two.

Here was the problem. For all its history, El Paso had a mountain range sitting right in the middle of it — these Franklins — splitting the city into pieces. To get from the west side to the northeast side, you couldn't go over the mountains; there was no road. You had to drive all the way around the whole range, miles and miles out of your way. The mountain that gave the city its dramatic scenery also cut it in half. And by the nineteen-sixties, a growing El Paso decided it had had enough of driving around: they were going to drive through.

So the engineers went up into the Franklins with dynamite and bulldozers and set about doing something audacious — cutting a highway straight up one side of the range, through the high pass, and down the other. And the centerpiece of it was a monster of a cut. Right up near the top, to get the road through the crest of the mountains, they had to carve a slot down through the solid rock — and it went down something like a hundred and fifty feet, sheer rock walls on either side. By the accounts of the day, it was the deepest cut the Texas highway men had ever made anywhere in the state — a canyon dug by human hands and dynamite, just to let the cars through. When it opened, around nineteen sixty-nine, the two halves of El Paso were finally joined over the top of their own mountain, and you could drive from one side of the city to the other right over the crest, on the road you're on now.

They named it later for a local judge named Woodrow Bean — a colorful character himself, said to be a distant cousin of the famous old hanging judge, Roy Bean. So when the road cuts deep between those towering walls of rock near the summit, look up at them, and know you're driving through a man-made slot in a billion-year-old mountain, blasted out of the living stone so that a city split by a range could finally shake hands over the top of it. Roll on up through the cut.