Hiking Photos

Gallery o'Photos: These are a few pictures I've taken around the El Paso area. Most of them are taken from half-way up the Franklin Mountains, which you'll notice stop smack in the middle of town. This (by nature) is an image-intensive page, so it may take a while to load. My apologies to anybody with modem connections as slow as mine!

Downtown El Paso is nestled snugly in the Rio Grande valley - and as you can tell, it's a tight fit.

The grayish area behind downtown is part of Juarez, Mexico. It's pretty close, if you can't tell.

Scenic Drive is an interesting road, built about halfway up the side of the Franklin Mountains. This is where most of these pictures were taken from, giving the prevelant overhead vantage point in these shots. In the background, you can see a religious message (in Spanish) to the city of Juarez, painted on the side of one of the nearby mountains in Mexico.

Some people have too much time on their hands.

This is another overhead view of the central district, where you can see the I-10 Interstate cutting through the city, left to right. The dividing line above that, where the landscape looks different, is where the Rio Grande is hiding. Once again, the gray area beyond that is Juarez, Mexico. Our "Sister City" is in many ways just a continuation of our own, as this picture may illustrate.

While climbing the hillsides directly above Scenic Drive, I discovered one of the oddities of mixing civilization with hilly terrain. If you're not careful, you'll smack your head on the power lines!

The poles are a respectable height, but the hill I was climbing came right up in the middle. And yes, I smacked my head on the power lines. It's a good thing it's not that easy to ground these things. For me, anyway.

Here's the view in the other direction, and you can see one of those sneaky little utility poles that just leap out at you.

You can see some of the radio and TV transmitters we have scattered across the mountain peaks, a monument to people climbing places they shouldn't be.

Like I was doing.

In case you thought you could get away without a picture of my VW Thing, here it is again. This is the downward view from the hill, where you can see my "car" parked on the side of Scenic Drive.

In case you're thinking about it, don't climb a mountain covered in thorn bushes and cactii when you're wearing shorts.

Not that I ever did that kind of thing...

Here is a ghostly view of the mountain range just east of El Paso, with the well-known peak whose name escapes me. But then, alot of things escape me.

Honestly, I would forget my own name, if it wasn't stitched to the inside of my underwear. And I have to remember it's not the part that says Haynes.

Here, we have a picture of the "Free Bridge", one of the three major gateways we have into and out of Mexico. Two of the bridges are tollways, but as you may have guessed - This one's free.

Of course, in the close-up you can see what that means: Even on a light day, (or during a light hour, actually) there's always a respectable collection of cars crossing the boundary between our two countries.

On a bad day (especially around Christmas) you just don't even want to know.

Here is a view from one of the parking lots at the Sun Bowl Stadium. Being the "Sun City" gives us a good number of pretty sunsets, especially coming over the mountain ridges. (Sorry about the color, It was much yellower than this, believe me!)

You can see the crucifix on the top of Mt. Cristo Rey - as well as the ASARCO copper smelter's main stack. Both have more historical significance than I'll pretend to remember. Just trust me on this.

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