The fabric of this vast continent ranges rising from verdant fields and prairies.

Alpine peaks casting jagged shadows over seas of sand crossing the border from New Mexico into the state of Texas.

You under the parched Chihuahuan Desert and Guadalupe Mountains National Park along an abandoned 19th century stage coach Road in West taxes, Guadalupe Mountains National Park showcases over 100 square miles of pristine wilderness, including the tallest peaks in Texas.

Had you been able to make this trip 250 million years ago, these same waterless flatlands would have looked like this before.

There were animals on this planet or flowering plants.

A salty inland sea covered thousands of square miles of what is now West Texas.

Then, some 200 million years ago that see ebbed and disappeared, leaving an ocean reef stranded in the killing son.

Today, this is simply assault in grain desert.

It's strange walking on waterless desert tracks of what had once been an ocean floor teeming with prehistoric sea life and then gazing up at El Capitan knowing that the rocks of this 8085 foot monolith had once been underwater and that an undersea reef rose to become Guadalupe Peak, the highest mountain in Texas.

These peaks poke into the rain clouds is, though, thirsting for water.

They were once submerged in their porous, limestone, absorbing moisture from the sky.

You're around the sky.

Water seeped throughout the fossil reef, often underground.

Then a times they burst forth as life giving springs New life Iraq's Once again this reef is teeming with living things, hiking trails winding through a pinion pine and for lead to spectacular views of El Capitan in the vast Chihuahuan desert.

Since its construction in 18 76 the for Holy Ranch House complex has been ranch, post office gathering place Ranger residents and now, museum.

Showcasing Guadalupe is diverse Legacy.

This had been Apache country Apache bands fought fiercely against the wagon loads of pioneers who had come to settle and the U.

S.

Cavalry that rode hard to protect them.

In the middle of the 19th century, the westbound Butterfield overland stage coach cut across this territory at Guadalupe Pass, you can see the ruins of its station house, the highest point on its 2800 mile route after the Civil War the African American ninth intense cavalry's were brought in to subdue the war.

Like Apaches, they fight like a cornered buffalo was the way the Apache size them up.

It was from their enemy that these African American fighting men got the name Buffalo soldiers.