If you’re thinking of heading to West Texas, you’ll want to brush up on these Guadalupe Mountains Fun Facts prior to arrival. Your friends will certainly appreciate your big brain, and hey, according to Aldous Huxley, “the more you know, the more you see”…
Guide to Guadalupe Mountains
Guadalupe Mountains Fun Facts
Fact 1 – Guadalupe Peak is the highest point in the state of Texas.
This is correct… In fact, the four highest peaks in Texas are situated right here in the park. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that 9 of the 10 tallest peaks in the Lone Star State are found right here in the Guadalupe Mountains.
The four tallest are:
Guadalupe Peak: 8,751′
Bush Mountain: 8,631′
Shumard Peak: 8,615′
Bartlett Peak: 8,508′
But if you really want to get the skinny on these peaks, consider the Fastest Known Time (FKT) on all four peaks is a mere 11 hours and 28 minutes!
What is a FKT? – The time taken to climb from parking lot to the summit of all four peaks, and return to the parking lot.
Fact 2 – The Guadalupe Mountains were witness to the greatest mass extinction of all time.
It is hard to imagine, but at one point about 260 million years ago, during the Permian Period, the land that you stand on in Guadalupe Mountains was a living marine reef, growing beneath the waters of the Delaware Sea. This reef is known to scientists as the Capitan Reef, and it was home to an incredible array of prehistoric life forms that would be unrecognizable today.
Life at this point was simple, biologically speaking, but had nevertheless evolved from simple algae and fungi to amphibians, fish and insects. Sea urchins, bivalve clams, trilobites, horn corals and brachiopods called the sea home. Cephalopods related to modern squid and octopi made their way through the waters in search of a tasty meal.
And so it went for a few million years, until an unknown event cut off the water flow to the Delaware Sea, and it began to dry up. Slowly, the Capitan Reef began to die as the water evaporated and the minerals left behind by the vanishing waters formed thin bands of mineral salts and mud, which over the course of a few hundred thousand years, buried the once great reef… and of course, the abundant collection of ancient life that lived there.
Scientists consider the end of the Permian period to be the greatest of all mass extinctions, and a true measure of the disappearance of diverse marine creatures will likely never be known.
Fact 3 – There’s gold in them thar hills…
Or so the story goes. And a great many men have listened to that very story, then headed into the Guadalupe Mountains in search of their fortune… Some not to return.
Rumors of gold in the Guadalupes go back to the 1600s, when the Spaniards were supposedly shown a gold mine by local Indians, who later killed the European visitors. So that story never really went anywhere.
During the 1800s, Geronimo is reported to have claimed that the richest gold mine in the western world was located in the Guadalupes, and reports of Apache Indians having gold were documented.
The most interesting story however, may be that of a poor man named Ben Sublett, who had spent time doing odd jobs around the west to make ends meet after his wife died in the 1870s.
As legend has it, Sublett spent a great deal of his time prospecting in the Lone Star State, hoping to strike it rich one day. He was well known in Odessa, Texas as a down-on-his-luck prospector… Until one day, after an extended absence from the small community, he showed up at the bar with a pouch of gold, buying drinks for the whole town.
Ol’ Ben had gold to throw around and never really had to work again. Many local folk suspected that he had discovered a mine deep in the Guadalupes, and maintained that when his stash got low, he just headed back to his mountain mine. So many believed this that numerous people tried to secretly follow him into the mountains, in hopes that he would unknowingly lead them to his private mine. But no one ever managed to maintain his trail once he entered the rugged mountains.
However, as one story goes, Sublett once shared the location of the mine with his good friend Mike Wilson. This lucky fellow actually found the mine and returned with his own pouch of gold. He then went on a month-long drinking binge. Once he sobered up, he could not recall his route to the mine, and spent the rest of his life looking for it.
Ben Sublett died in 1892, and is buried in Odessa. He left no map to his treasure, and no one has came across the fabled gold mine… at least as far as we know…
Anyway… Can I buy you a drink….?
Guadalupe Mountains Stat Sheet
established: September 30, 1972 as Guadalupe Mountains National Park
rank of admission: 36
size: 170,000
rank in size: 41
annual visitation: 2018 – 172,347
rank in visitation: 49
time zone: Central Time
park phone: 915 828 3251
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