Culberson County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Culberson County

Eight thousand seven hundred and forty-nine feet of elevation at Guadalupe Peak makes it the highest point in Texas — a sandstone-and-limestone summit inside Guadalupe Mountains National Park, accessible only via the 8.4-mile out-and-back Guadalupe Peak Trail from the Pine Springs trailhead (3,000 ft of elevation gain, NPS-classified as strenuous, typical 6-8 hour round trip). The Capitan Reef exposed in the surrounding Guadalupes is the world's largest and most-studied Permian-age fossil reef per Geological Society of America stratigraphic surveys — 260 million years old, originally a 400-mile barrier reef along the western edge of the Permian Sea, now uplifted and weathered into the modern Guadalupe and Apache Mountains escarpment. Culberson County is one of the most sparsely populated counties in the contiguous United States at 2,188 residents across 3,812 sq mi (0.57 persons per sq mi, putting it in the bottom 10 contiguous-US counties by density per US Census 2020 Decennial).

The 3,812-sq-mi county wraps the eastern Guadalupe Mountains National Park, the salt flats west of the park (a Pleistocene-age playa basin that was sacred Mescalero Apache salt-gathering land and a 19th-century commercial salt-mining flashpoint — the 1877 El Paso Salt War turned violent over Anglo claims to traditional Mexican-American salt rights), and the Van Horn rural town (population 1,919, the county seat on I-10 and the only town with grocery, propane, and diesel within 65 miles). Pine Springs Campground inside Guadalupe Mountains NP accepts rigs to 30 ft on 19 first-come no-hookup sites — the only NPS-operated RV-accessible base in the park, with reservation not offered and arrival by 10 a.m. recommended in spring through Texas spring break. Dog Canyon Campground on the north side of the park (accessed only via a 70-mile NM-side approach through Carlsbad NM) accepts rigs to 30 ft on 4 sites. Blue Origin's Launch Site One (Jeff Bezos's commercial spaceflight base) sits in the county's southern desert near Van Horn and is closed to public access; launch days draw crowds to the I-10 frontage road but the launch pad itself is not visible from any public road. I-10 is the only paved east-west through-route across Culberson County.