By Richard Teschner
In March 2023, El Paso’s 6,663-acre Castner Range was dedicated as a national monument, the result of a 50-year-long campaign. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another 50 for the range to get a hiking trail.
On the range from 1926-1966, Fort Bliss troops were taught how to shoot. After training moved elsewhere, Castner was still closed to non-Army access because of the many MECs (munitions and explosives of concern) and UXOs (unexploded ordnance) lying beneath the surface.
Since 1998, Castner Range’s under-surface areas have been carefully and thoroughly studied. Today we know the location of almost all the MECs and UXOs. What we do not know is when those MECs and UXOs will be dug up and thrown out.
For obvious reasons, folks can’t be allowed to hike on land that might explode beneath their feet. But 25% of the Franklin Mountains lie inside the range, and El Paso’s hikers want to hike the Franklins and not just view them from the road.
Digging up all the MECs and UXOs to build trails would be bad because doing that would also dig up the range’s famous poppies, destroying them in the process. So how’s about building just one hiking trail, on parts of the range where fewer poppies grow?
That is what we’re working towards right now – a trail from an accessible location (the parking lot of the El Paso Museum of Archaeology on Transmountain Road) up the range to the eastern boundary of the Franklin Mountains State Park, home to a dozen hiking trails of its own. Some of them reach Castner Range’s boundary.
The trail would lie alongside the 6,542-feet-high Indian Spring Peak, the only mountain in the Franklins that lies entirely inside the range. Like all mountain canyons, the Indian Spring Canyon has a bed, and land next to beds can be flat enough to support trails. Also good news is that the higher and more mountainous the range’s land is, the fewer MECs and UXOs there are.
So the plan would work like this: Map out an Indian Spring trail, then dig up and take away the MECs and UXOs underneath it. This would take time and cost money, but that’s a small price to pay for a long-sought-after public benefit – a hiking trail in Castner Range.
But how do we keep the hikers from wandering off the trail onto land with MECs and UXOs beneath it? Build a fence on either side of the trail, then put up signs explaining why.
The time has come for the range’s permanent owner – Fort Bliss – to get the ball rolling on this.
El Pasoans have long looked forward to when they can happily shout “Hike Two Three Four!”
Richard Teschner is professor emeritus of languages and linguistics at the University of Texas at El Paso and a longtime advocate for creation of Castner Range National Monument.
The post Opinion: El Paso deserves a hiking trail in Castner Range appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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