Culberson County Texas map
31.45° N · 104.53° W · County seat: Van Horn · 3,812 sq mi
The highest ground in Texas is in the northwest corner of Culberson County: Guadalupe Peak, 8,751 feet, inside Guadalupe Mountains National Park. The county is the fifth largest in the state by area and had 2,188 residents in 2020, nearly all of them in Van Horn.
Van Horn sits at the I-10 and US-90 junction in the south. The Guadalupe escarpment rises at the top of the map, on the New Mexico line.
Where Culberson County is
It is a tall rectangle running north from I-10 to the New Mexico state line. Eddy County, New Mexico lies north and Otero County, New Mexico northwest; neither is a Texas county, so the only Texas neighbours are Reeves County east, Jeff Davis County south and Hudspeth County west.
The nearest city page on this site is El Paso, 117 miles northwest in a straight line; Marfa is 84 miles southeast and Alpine 91 miles southeast. Odessa is 130 miles northeast. The county was split off El Paso County in 1911 and organized the following year, and it is named for David Browning Culberson, a Civil War soldier and long-serving U.S. congressman from Jefferson.
Van Horn
Van Horn is the only incorporated place in the county and held 1,928 people in 2020, about 88 percent of the whole county population. It is a highway town: the point where US-90 leaves I-10 to run southeast toward Marfa and Alpine, and the last full service stop for drivers heading west across the Hudspeth flats or east across the Salt Basin. Everything else in the county is unincorporated — Kent, out at the I-10 and State Highway 118 junction, and the ranch headquarters scattered along the Delaware and Apache mountains.
2024 Census estimate for Van Horn: 2,011, one of the few small Trans-Pecos towns growing rather than shrinking.
Interstate 10 and the roads north
- I-10 – crosses the southern end of the county east–west, with an 80 mph limit; the run from Van Horn east to Fort Stockton is one of the longest stretches in Texas without a town.
- US-90 – begins its Texas career at I-10 in Van Horn and heads southeast to Valentine, Marfa and Alpine.
- US-62/180 – clips the far north of the county below the Guadalupe escarpment, linking El Paso with Carlsbad, New Mexico and passing the national park headquarters at Pine Springs.
- State Highway 54 – the county's spine, running north from Van Horn up the Salt Basin to meet US-62/180 near the mountains.
Guadalupe Peak and the national park
Guadalupe Mountains National Park covers the northwestern corner of the county. The range is the exposed edge of a Permian reef, which is why the rock is limestone and why the same formation reappears underground as the oil-bearing beds of the Permian Basin. Guadalupe Peak at 8,751 feet is the state high point; El Capitan, the blunt cliff visible from US-62/180 for forty miles, stands just south of it and was the landmark stagecoach drivers steered by. McKittrick Canyon, on the eastern side, holds bigtooth maples that turn colour in late October and early November — the reason the park has a short but real peak season.
Away from the park the county is basin-and-range desert: the Salt Basin flats west of State Highway 54, sulphur and talc workings, and rangeland measured in sections rather than acres. North of Van Horn, Blue Origin operates its West Texas launch site, which is the largest single employer the county has gained in decades.