After Elephant Butte, we headed to Carlsbad Caverns via El Paso, Texas. El Paso’s traffic on I-10 seemed crazy-busy to us compared to Albuquerque or Santa Fe. No surprise, since the El Paso-Juárez area is home to about 2.7 million people, where the Albuquerque metro is about 1.2 million. The area is also home to the U.S. Army’s Fort Bliss, which houses about 11,000 people.