Chaparral

High-desert community straddling the New Mexico-Texas border just north of El Paso.

Chaparral is a small unincorporated community straddling the New Mexico-Texas border, sitting in the high desert just north of El Paso. It is not a destination in itself, but its location along US-54 makes it a practical stopping point for travelers heading north toward White Sands or Las Cruces.

The surrounding Tularosa Basin landscape is stark and beautiful in the way that only the Chihuahuan Desert can be: flat, sun-baked, and enormous. There are a few fast-food joints and gas stations along the highway, but for anything more substantial you are better off continuing to Las Cruces, about 25 miles north, or crossing into El Paso. If you are driving up from Texas, Chaparral is where the emptiness of southern New Mexico begins in earnest.

Guide

Day Trips

The reason to be in this corner of New Mexico is the country around it. White Sands National Park, an hour and a half north on US-54, is the largest gypsum dune field on earth and the standout sight of southern New Mexico. El Paso and across the border into Ciudad Juárez sit twenty minutes south; the Franklin Mountains State Park, which fills the city's centre, has some of the best urban hiking in the United States. Las Cruces and the Organ Mountains are 30 minutes northwest, and the Mesilla historic district just south of Las Cruces has the only nineteenth-century plaza in the area that still feels like the old Southwest.

Guide

Getting There

Chaparral straddles US-54, the main highway between El Paso and Alamogordo. From El Paso International Airport it is a twenty-minute drive north; from Las Cruces about twenty-five minutes south on NM-404. There is no public transport. The nearest Greyhound stop is in El Paso. Most people who pass through Chaparral are doing so by car, often on the way to White Sands or Carlsbad Caverns.

Guide

Things to Do

Chaparral itself has no real sights — it is a stretch of gas stations, mobile homes and fast-food strips along US-54. What makes the area worth pulling over for is the desert outside town: the open Tularosa Basin to the north, the Franklin Mountains rising above El Paso to the south, and the empty sky in between. Bring water, fill the tank and keep going.