Oasis Gas station

Guadalupe Mountains National Park, in Hudspeth and Culberson counties on the New Mexico border, preserves some of the exposed remnants of the Capitan Reef, one of the world's finest examples of ancient barrier reefs. The Guadalupe Range slopes upward from New Mexico to its highest peak within the national park. The park comprises 76,293 acres and includes the four highest peaks in Texas. Beginning some 250 million years ago, seawater and decaying marine organisms deposited lime along the shallow shelf of the Delaware Basin of the Permian Sea, forming a reef many hundreds of feet thick. Sediments buried the reef as the ocean drained away. Compression within the earth pushed up the area within the past ten to twelve million years. Erosion began to wear away the softer sedimentary rock, exposing parts of the hard limestone of the Capitan Reef. In a process that continues today, runoff from the old reef began to deposit salt on the flats now west of the park boundaries.