El Paso’s Trans-Mountain Highway, 1969A road through the rock.

The cars look very small. In the December 1969 magazine photograph, four lanes bend through a bowl of bare rock, with mountains rising on either side. A driver could now cross the Franklins here without having to negotiate the ground the survey crews had struggled over. Getting the road into that photograph had been considerably less relaxing.

“El Paso’s High Road” reported that Trans-Mountain Road opened on August 5, 1969. About 200 cars joined an east-to-west caravan. Former County Judge Woodrow Bean, credited in the story with helping secure the project, left his hospital bed to cut the ribbon. The 1969 opening report

The magazine described the crossing as part of a larger Loop 375 that would eventually connect the upper and lower Rio Grande valleys. The mountain section was open; the larger route was still an ambition. That helps explain the occasion: El Paso had gained a usable crossing through a major physical barrier, even though the promised loop was unfinished.

The Trans-Mountain Road photograph collection follows the roadway in later archive views. Here, the freshly exposed cuts and broad pavement show the crossing near the beginning of its working life.

Before the heavy equipment arrived, surveyors had to carry their own equipment over rock and through cactus. The article describes slopes west of Smugglers Gap so steep that access on foot replaced the jeeps used elsewhere. Radios substituted for hand signals when the terrain blocked the crews’ view of one another.

The H. B. Zachry Company began the $5.6 million grading project in spring 1967. According to the magazine, crews excavated more than 4.5 million cubic yards over 7.5 miles. Those figures describe a particular construction job, not the cost or length of the eventual Loop 375. Construction quantities and working conditions

Even water was a job in itself. The base work needed roughly 200,000 gallons a day. A well drilled on the west side produced too little, so water had to be pumped from farther away. On the east, daytime limits on the city supply led the contractor to pump at night into a storage tank. The dramatic rock cuts photograph well. A tank filling overnight is less impressive, but the paving still depended on it.

The continuation photograph puts a yellow car beneath a nearly vertical cut. The article describes a small slide at Smugglers Gap earlier that year and says engineers were watching for further movement before applying another surface. Opening day did not end their attention to the rock above the road.