West Texas

I was out in West Texas this weekend with one of my children.  It was hot and dry, but the Chihuahuan Desert was filled with sturdy and tenacious life.

Hudspeth, Culberson, and Davis Counties were scenic with mountains as we headed east on Interstate 10.  (Once we entered the Permian Basin, though, the land became endlessly flat, and dotted with oil and gas wells.)

Below is a photo I took of rocky hills in Hudspeth County that look to me like they are made up of some kind of intrusive igneous rock.  

They were on the other side of the highway from Sierra Blanca, a conical 6,891-foot peak that is something of a landmark and gives a nearby community its name.

In the distance were the Apache Mountains, one of three places where the Capitan Reef is exposed. The Capitan Reef was an enormous 400-mile reef that surrounded a sea called the Delaware Sea in the Permian Period, approximately 250 million years ago. The reef was buried under millions of years of sediment until mountain ranges were uplifted (primarily during the Laramide orogeny), exposing parts of the limestone "fossil reef" left by reef-building creatures like sponges, algae, coral, and other lime-secreting marine life (the other exposed parts of the Capitan Reef are found in the Guadalupe and Glass Mountains).

Below is a picture of Gomez Peak (6,320 ft) under gathering clouds.  It is located at the northern end of the Davis Mountains.

The clouds promise rain, which usually arrives in late summer (it poured in El Paso just after we returned home).  The desert blooms, and the colors of the rock are joined by the brightness of wildflowers.