El Paso's Tin Mines

This last weekend, M and I hiked to a series of tin mines in the Franklin Mountains. I discovered the trail from a great local blog, elpasonaturally. The first thing we noticed about this hike was although it was in the middle of the city, there weren't any sounds of the city, no sign of the suburbs; not even a plane flying overhead.

a rare El Paso scene... no signs of the city!

The first 2 miles of the hike were on old mining roads that have been converted to hike/bike trails. This made for great easy walking over hard-packed gravel. We saw lots of small yellow flowers and a few early-crop poppies.















The old mining roads were built around 1901 as a way to cross through the Franklin Mountains, where the present-day Transmountain Road/Loop 365 runs. Several roads also ran from the railroad and highway heading up towards Alamagordo to springs located along the eastern edge of the Franklins. The geology of the Franklins is mostly limestone with some granite intrusions. The tin was discovered in these granite intrusions. Tin is very rare in North America. However, it wasn't profitable enough so the mines were shut down in 1915.

The small dark dots on the left are mine grates... Up above you can
see the lighter bands of limestone.

Grates covering mine trenches and shafts.

M striking his usual photography pose

After a few wrong turns, we made it to the entrance to the main mine. Luckily, I had cell service the whole hike and was able to follow the GPS map from AllTrails. It saved our asses several times. After some really loose rock-scrambling, we made it up to the entrance and were delighted to discover you could walk into the mines! I've never been inside an un-manned mine before.

We had brought headlamps because we thought we'd be able to look into the mine. Little did we know we would be able to walk pretty far back into the shafts.

My first thought was Mountain Lions and drug-runners would enjoy living in these unlocked abandoned tunnels. Should we come across any, we would resort to defending ourselves by whipping them with our cameras and water bottles. (Not a fantastic plan....)

I was enjoying the features of my new camera so we shot a quick video of M playing in the mine... Its on my YouTube page.


Also, you can check out this YouTube video... The guy recorded a half hour of exploring the tunnels. It'll make you queasy in that Blair Witch sorta way.

The vertical pit that made it impossible for me to
continue into the tunnel. What if it contained a
mountain lion, or big scary cave monster?!

M or scary cave monster?

No scary cave monster... just M :-)

After leaving the upper entrance, we found a route down to a lower entrance. This tunnel was much smaller than the upper one. You had to stoop over to walk through it, or crawl on your knees.









M went in and explored this tunnel. It was lit in the back by the trench that we walked along earlier in the upper entrance. It branched off in several directions, some tunnels going quite far back. From the looks of the 30 minute video on YouTube, we didn't miss too much by not exploring it fully.

M heads in!

After leaving the mines, and getting a bit off trail in a washed out gully, we retraced our path back down the mountain to the neighborhood where we had parked. It was a very cool hike, a great place to take kids, and I'm glad we did it (in spite of my pulled thigh muscle that cramped up for most of the trip. I pulled it hiking a few weeks ago).

The muscle-pulling hike we did last time. See the tiny trail down below....
The car is parked down there.