49 Fun Facts About Guadalupe Mountains National Park

Guadalupe Mountains National Park lies in far West Texas, east of which city?

El Paso has the nearest major airport, and the country between is so empty that the park sells no fuel, food or lodging: visitors are told to arrive with everything they need.

Which distinction does Guadalupe Peak hold?

The highest point in Texas, yet it is not the park's most striking sight: a lower neighbour with a sheer cliff face steals the view from the highway.

What marks the summit of Guadalupe Peak?

A stainless steel pyramid was set there in 1958, before the park existed, by American Airlines, which saw the stagecoach mail drivers who once passed below as forerunners of its airmail pilots.

Guadalupe Mountains National Park lies in which region of far West Texas?

The Trans-Pecos, the wedge of Texas west of the Pecos River, is about the size of South Carolina, yet nearly all of it is private ranchland, desert and bare mountain.

Which spot on US 62/180 holds the headquarters and main visitor center of Guadalupe Mountains National Park?

Pine Springs grew up around the spring that once watered the Pinery, a stagecoach station whose stone ruins still stand a short walk from the visitor center.

The pale cliffs of the Guadalupe Mountains are made of which rock?

Limestone: the range is an ancient reef turned to stone, and rain sinks straight into the porous rock, which is why the high country has almost no streams.

The Capitan Reef ringed which vanished inland ocean during the Permian?

Delaware Sea: when its narrow outlet to the ocean closed, the water evaporated and layer upon layer of minerals filled the basin, burying the reef until the land rose again.

Unlike modern coral reefs, the Capitan Reef was built mainly by which organisms?

Sponges and algae laid down the skeletons, then encrusting organisms grew over them and cemented the mass into solid rock, where a modern reef leans on a rigid frame of coral.

Roughly how long is the Capitan Reef, the mostly buried band of rock that surfaces in the Guadalupe Mountains?

About 400 miles: the reef loops around the bed of its old sea and reaches daylight in only three mountain ranges, with all the rest still buried beneath the plains.

The reef rock of the Guadalupe Mountains dates from which chapter of Earth's history?

Before the first dinosaurs: the reef grew about 265 million years ago, and geologists worldwide now call that slice of time the Guadalupian, after these mountains.

Organic-rich mud that settled in the deep basin beside the Capitan Reef eventually turned into what?

Oil and gas: the stagnant depths held no oxygen, so the dead plants and animals never rotted away, and heat and pressure slowly cooked them into the fuel the Permian Basin is drilled for.

Texas has two national parks: Guadalupe Mountains and which older one?

Big Bend, opened in 1944, is the other: Padre Island and Big Thicket belong to the Park Service too, but as a national seashore and a national preserve, and Palo Duro Canyon is a state park.

Which president signed the act establishing Guadalupe Mountains National Park?

Lyndon B. Johnson signed it in 1966, but the gates stayed shut for six more years while the government bought the huge private ranch that makes up most of the park.

Wallace Pratt, who donated McKittrick Canyon, was what by profession?

Petroleum geologist: hired in 1918 as his company's first, he proved to an industry that drilled on hunches that reading the rocks beat luck.

Wallace Pratt's second house in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, built to resemble a seagoing vessel, is known by what name?

Ship on the Desert stands on high ground outside the canyon because a flood once trapped the Pratts at their first cabin and convinced them not to retire there.

Wallace Pratt's cabin in McKittrick Canyon is built almost entirely of wood and which other material?

Stone: even the roof is laid with slabs of local stone over timber rafters, which is why the Pratts called the house simply the Stone Cabin.

McKittrick Canyon is famous each autumn for the turning leaves of which tree?

Bigtooth maple, a western cousin of the sugar maple, survives here only because the canyon's high walls and year-round stream shelter it from the desert all around.

Which unusual tree in Guadalupe Mountains National Park has red bark that curls and peels away each year?

Texas madrone sheds its red bark to bare smooth new bark beneath, and its bright red berries earned it the local name manzanita, Spanish for little apple.

McKittrick Canyon is thought to be named after Felix McKittrick, who did what there in the 1870s?

Worked cattle: McKittrick was one of the first settlers to stay in a range most pioneers judged too rugged and dry, taking land at the canyon mouth while raids were still a danger.

Which fish, unexpected in a desert range, did ranchers stock in McKittrick Canyon's spring-fed creek?

Rainbow trout were released in 1941 by the canyon's two owners, rancher J.C. Hunter and Wallace Pratt, the same pair whose land later became the heart of the park.

Which Apache band harvested agave in the Guadalupes and takes its name from that plant?

Mescalero means mescal-maker: the bands roasted agave hearts in big pits for food, and the scorched rings of those pits can still be found across the park.

Among the US cavalry sent into the Guadalupe Mountains after the Civil War were regiments known by what nickname?

Buffalo Soldiers, Black troopers of the 9th Cavalry, rode out of frontier posts such as Fort Quitman, and their campaigns helped force the range's Apache bands onto reservations.

In September 1858, what did the first mail coach out of St. Louis meet just below Guadalupe Pass?

The first coach from California, out of San Francisco on the same new mail line, pulled alongside at dusk, and for the length of one roadside chat the two ends of the continent were joined.

After less than a year, the Butterfield stages left Guadalupe Pass for a southern road that passed what?

A string of Army forts: the lower road ran by Fort Stockton and Fort Davis, whose soldiers offered protection, though travellers went on camping at the empty Pinery for years.

Which spiders cross the trails of Guadalupe Mountains National Park each fall as the males go looking for mates?

Tarantulas spend most of the year hidden in their burrows; the autumn walkers are mature males, which rarely survive long after their one mating season.

Which desert animal is often seen in Guadalupe Mountains National Park munching the pads of prickly pear cactus?

Javelina look like small wild pigs but belong to a separate family, the peccaries, and prickly pear and agave make up the bulk of what they eat.

Which restored 1876 ranch in Guadalupe Mountains National Park houses a museum and is the Smith Spring trailhead?

Frijole Ranch sits beside a spring, and a later family used the water to run an orchard and market garden in the desert, raising fruit to sell.

Before it became a park, the Guadalupe high country was summer range mainly for which livestock?

Sheep and goats: Judge J.C. Hunter ran thousands of Angora goats for their mohair, and he piped water up from lowland springs to tanks on the mountaintop to keep the herds alive.

Legend has the remote Williams Ranch house built for a bride who did what?

Stayed one night and headed home, the story goes, though nobody has proved it: the records show the groom's brother settling in with his wife and baby daughter instead.

The dunes on the west side of Guadalupe Mountains National Park are made of what?

Gypsum sand is rare because the mineral dissolves in water; it piles into bright white dunes only in dry basins like this one, where too little rain falls to carry it away.

Which desert surrounds the Guadalupe Mountains?

Chihuahuan Desert scrub rings the range, but the peaks rise so far above it that a single day's hike can climb from cactus flats into cool conifer forest.

Which wild cat, rarely seen by visitors, hunts the mule deer of Guadalupe Mountains National Park by night?

Mountain lion: the park's most reclusive hunter can roam any of its habitats but keeps to wherever deer are plentiful, sharing the top of the food chain with the black bear.

Which other national park lies farther north in the same Guadalupe Mountains range?

Carlsbad Caverns: acidic water seeped into cracks in the same buried reef and dissolved out its vast chambers, so the two parks share one slab of ancient rock.

The ringtail of the Guadalupe canyons looks part fox, part weasel, but is really a relative of which animal?

Raccoon: the ringtail shares its cousin's banded tail and its night shift, using outsized eyes and ears to hunt insects, lizards and mice among the rocks.

The rare Guadalupe Mountains violet grows only in what kind of spot?

On sheer rock faces, rooted in cracks high in the mountains, grows a violet that was unknown to science until 1990 and, despite its name, flowers yellow.

Which conifers dominate the high-country forests of the Guadalupe Mountains, above 7,000 feet?

Ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir are holdovers from the last Ice Age: as the lowlands dried into desert, the forest hung on only up top, where the air is cooler and wetter.

Archaeological finds show people have used the Guadalupe Mountains for at least how long?

10,000 years at least: spear points, baskets, pottery and rock art left in the range's caves and rock shelters go back to hunters who followed game here as the Ice Age ended.

What was the job of Waterman Ormsby, the only through passenger on the first westbound Butterfield stage in 1858?

Newspaper reporter: Ormsby filed dispatches to the New York Herald along the way, grumbling in one that Guadalupe Peak 'loomed up before us all day in the most aggravating manner'.

Before the Butterfield stages began in 1858, how did most mail from the East Coast reach California?

By steamship via Panama: letters sailed to the isthmus, crossed it by canoe, pack animal and later railroad, then sailed north again, decades before any canal existed.

Why do visitors' phones often show the wrong time in Guadalupe Mountains National Park?

The park keeps Mountain Time by local custom while its county officially runs on Central like most of Texas, so a phone that trusts the map is an hour off.

Which tree of the Guadalupe lowlands often has more wood below ground than above, thanks to its deep roots?

Honey mesquite sends its roots deep underground after water, and those taproots, often thicker than the trunk itself, have long been dug up for firewood.

What turned the long-buried Capitan Reef into today's Guadalupe Mountains?

Uplift along faults: steep breaks in the crust on the range's western side lifted the reef thousands of feet, and erosion then stripped away the softer rock that had buried it.

Which two groups of Capitan Reef sea creatures died out for good in the mass extinction that ended the Permian?

Horn corals and trilobites vanished in the greatest mass extinction on record, though the trilobites had been dwindling for ages: only a handful of kinds were left to lose.

Since 1978, more than half of Guadalupe Mountains National Park has carried which federal designation?

Wilderness: the 1978 act covered 46,850 acres of high country under a law written for places 'where man himself is a visitor who does not remain'.

Wallace Pratt's second wife, Iris Calderhead, had been a national organizer in which movement?

Women's suffrage: she organized for the National Woman's Party in the 1910s, and the front door of the couple's last Texas home is still painted the movement's purple.

The oldest ranch house in Guadalupe Mountains National Park doubled as what for its neighbours from 1916 to 1942?

Post office: a rancher's wife served as postmistress, and as the only large building for miles the house also hosted the district's dances and gatherings.

Which animal did rancher J.C. Hunter bring from South Dakota to replace herds hunted out of the Guadalupes?

Elk: the native herds were gone by the late 1800s, so the animals grazing the high country today descend from a few dozen that Hunter had sent down from the Black Hills.

From November to March, Guadalupe Mountains National Park is notorious for which weather hazard?

High winds: gusts above 50 miles an hour are common in the cold months, official warnings come again and again, and past 55 the park tells hikers to turn back.

In 1877 a deadly feud broke out over who owned which resource on the flats west of the Guadalupe Mountains?

Salt: local families had carted it away free for generations, so when a newcomer filed a private claim on the lake beds the quarrel grew into the San Elizario Salt War.