In far West Texas, just beyond the city lights of El Paso, the Franklin Mountains rise like a jagged backbone against the desert sky. Stretching north into New Mexico and flanked by wide, empty basins, this is where Texas tapers off—not in ambition, but in noise. Out here, towns like Dell City, Clint, and Butterfield remain small by design and isolated by geography.
Seclusion, in this region, isn’t an escape so much as a default setting. Residents trade proximity for peace, and the result is a string of communities where time moves differently. Cell service is spotty. Neighbors are few. But ask anyone in Fort Hancock or Hueco Tanks Village what keeps them here, and the answers echo: space, silence, sky.
These 10 towns dot the margins of the Franklin range, tucked into canyons, foothills, and valleys carved more by weather than by developers. Some are sustained by farming, some by history, and some—like Cornudas—by the simple fact that there’s nowhere else quite like them…