Franklin Mountains State Park spans much of the Franklin Mountains within El Paso, making it one of the nation’s largest urban mountain parks. Long used as a travel corridor and resource area, the range preserves evidence of human presence from more than 12,000 years ago. It also protects an ancient landscape tied to the Rio Grande rift and containing some of Texas’s oldest rocks. Named through local usage linked to Benjamin Franklin Coons and the early settlement of Franklin, the mountains were secured as a state park only after decades of preservation efforts, with the park created in 1979, acquired in 1981, and opened in 1987.