Salt Flat: End of the Road Town

Salt Flat sits about ninety miles east of El Paso on the highway that skirts the base of the Guadalupe Mountains, and the name is exactly what it says. The area is a dry salt pan, a flat mineral basin fed by shallow lakes that form after rains drain off the Guadalupes. Native Americans and Mexican settlers used these salt deposits for centuries. In the eighteen seventies, El Paso businessmen tried to claim the salt beds as private property, triggering the El Paso Salt War of eighteen seventy-seven , one of the bloodiest land disputes in Texas Reconstruction history.

When Highway Sixty-Two slash One Eighty opened in nineteen twenty-nine connecting El Paso to Carlsbad, Salt Flat became a gas-and-water stop for travelers crossing the empty Trans-Pecos. At its peak, in the early nineteen sixties, the town held an estimated one hundred twenty-five residents. Salt production ended by the late nineteen thirties, and today Salt Flat is mostly abandoned structures alongside the highway: a few weathered buildings, a water tower, and one of the longest views in Texas.