Seven years ago, the trail system most West El Paso hikers and mountain bikers use without a second thought nearly became a subdivision. Voters had to show up to a special election to stop it, and even then, the price tag for saving it swung wildly enough that nobody in city government could agree on what "saving it" actually cost. This spring, the state added more than a thousand acres to the mountain range next door, and there was no vote, no ballot measure, and no argument about who should pay for it. Same general stretch of desert. Completely different way of protecting it.
If you live in West El Paso and use the Redd Road trails on a Saturday morning, that shift matters more than it sounds like it should.
The vote nobody remembers arguing about
In 2019, the trail most locals call Lost Dog was built into the middle of a fight over land the city already owned. The trailhead off Redd Road opens into a network locals sometimes call the Redd Road Trails, and The Prospector reported that El Pasoans voted in a May 4 special election to preserve 1,107 acres, including the Lost Dog Trail, from development tied to city-approved Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones.
The trail itself wasn't a city project to begin with. It was built in 2012 by El Pasoan Gilbert Moreno with volunteers from the Borderland Mountain Bike Association, using materials donated by Jobe Materials, according to a history posted on Hiking Project. No government funding, no formal planning process. Just a resident who wanted a trail and a bike club willing to build it.
So when the city put the underlying land on the table in 2018 and 2019, the cost of keeping it went from theoretical to real, and nobody could pin down what "real" meant. The Prospector's reporting put the preservation cost estimates anywhere from $10,000 to $11.3 million, depending on which stakeholder you asked. A stakeholder committee got 90 days to figure it out, a window that expired that August. District 6 representative Claudia Ordaz said publicly she didn't want the East Side and the Valley "having to subsidize the cost for a West Side project." One West Side resident, Alan Gutierrez, put it more bluntly, saying the math gave him anxiety because it seemed backwards that keeping land as it already was would cost more than building on it.
The trail survived. But it survived through a process that could have gone the other way, and that uncertainty is easy to forget once you're just out there walking your dog on a Sunday.
A quieter kind of expansion
Compare that to what happened this May. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department added 1,054 acres to the eastern edge of Franklin Mountains State Park, extending the protected buffer all the way to Martin Luther King Boulevard, according to reporting from Hoodline. Park Superintendent Cesar Mendez called it a win worth celebrating, saying simply, "I am excited about this acquisition." No ballot. No stakeholder committee arguing over who pays what. A state agency identified land worth protecting and bought it.
The addition brings the park to roughly 28,000 acres with more than 120 miles of trail, and officials say the new acreage secures trailhead access on the northeast side while adding a buffer against future development creeping toward the range. It will take months of resource surveys before that specific new land opens to visitors, but the acquisition itself is done.
Here's the contrast laid out plainly:
| 2019 Lost Dog vote | 2026 Franklin Mountains purchase | |
|---|---|---|
| Acreage involved | 1,107 acres | 1,054 acres |
| Who decided | El Paso voters, by special election | Texas Parks and Wildlife Department |
| Cost to preserve | Estimated between $10,000 and $11.3 million, contested publicly | Handled through state acquisition, no local ballot |
| Public process | Months of committee debate and council disagreement | Announced as a completed purchase |
Same instinct, protect land that people already hike and ride, but a completely different level of institutional weight behind it. The trail system West El Paso built for itself in 2012 and had to fight to keep in 2019 now sits next to a park that just grew by over a thousand acres without anyone needing to organize a vote.
What's actually underfoot right now
None of this changes what a Saturday morning at the Lost Dog Trailhead looks like today. The parking area sits just off Redd Road, and from there the trails fan out toward Transmountain Road, connecting into the larger Redd Road network that stretches across roughly 14 square miles, according to Visit El Paso's trail description. It's rocky in stretches, dog-friendly enough that leashes are more of a suggestion than a rule in practice, and popular enough with mountain bikers that weekend mornings mean sharing the singletrack.
It's not the most dramatic scenery in the Franklins. What it offers instead is proximity. You can be on dirt within minutes of leaving a West El Paso driveway, which is the whole appeal for people who use it three or four times a week rather than as a special-occasion hike.
The dinner list is catching up
While the trail politics played out over years, the dining scene around West El Paso moved fast this year. In January 2026, three Michelin-starred chefs, Mikel Alonso, Jonatán Gómez Luna, and Carlos Gaytán, opened Kala BajaMed in West El Paso, according to KTSM's coverage. Owner Benjamin Arriola described it as "the first restaurant in El Paso to not have only one Michelin star chef but three," blending Baja California cooking with Mediterranean technique.
That kind of opening doesn't happen in a neighborhood by accident. It happens where there's already a dining culture worth building on, and West El Paso has had one for a while. Mi Piaci, an Italian restaurant specializing in steak and seafood, has served the West El Paso region for close to 14 years under chef and owner Cosimo Battaglia, who trained in Calabria before settling in El Paso, per its OpenTable listing. Kala BajaMed didn't create demand for a serious dinner out on the West Side. It arrived because that demand was already there.
Coffee before or after
The same logic applies to what's happening with coffee. City permit filings from this spring show a new Dutch Bros. location approved for 135 Shadow Mountain Drive, near the intersection of Mesa Street and Sunland Park Drive, with the project valued at $185,000, according to reporting picked up by AOL from the El Paso Times. Meanwhile, on the higher end of the spectrum, 787 Coffee's West Side location at 5220 Doniphan Drive is part of a chain that was just ranked the number one coffee shop in El Paso, and 32nd in North America, by The World's 100 Best Coffee Shops in 2026, a ranking built on judging from more than 200 professional evaluators and over 200,000 public votes across more than 4,600 shops, according to 787 Coffee's own writeup.
A drive-thru chain expanding into the neighborhood and a nationally ranked specialty roaster opening a West Side location in the same stretch of months tells you something about where people are willing to spend their morning routine.
What this actually means if you already live here
The version of West El Paso that almost lost its own trailhead to a development fight in 2019 is not the same West El Paso sitting next to a park that just grew by over a thousand acres with no controversy at all. The outdoor backbone of the neighborhood has moved from something residents had to organize and vote to protect, to something a state agency is actively expanding on its own initiative. The dining and coffee scene catching up around it isn't a coincidence. It's what tends to happen once an area's outdoor identity stops being fragile and starts being permanent.
If you're the kind of person who already has an opinion about which Lost Dog route beats the summer heat best, none of this changes your Saturday. But it's worth knowing that the ground under that Saturday is more secure than it was a few years ago, and that the neighborhood around it is filling in to match.
If you're weighing what any of that means for a home in West El Paso, whether you're already here or thinking about it, BHG Elevate and broker Thelma Briffa know this stretch of the Franklins as well as anyone selling real estate in El Paso. Reach out for a free home valuation whenever you're curious what your corner of West El Paso is worth today.
