The Caprock

The caprock's story begins in the Rocky Mountains. As the Rockies rose in the Cenozoic, rain and snowmelt carried their debris east. Where mountain streams slowed on the plains, they dropped boulders, pebbles and silt, choked their own beds and spread out again, building great interconnected alluvial fans. Calcium carbonate carried from the mountains in solution seeped into those deposits and, as the water evaporated, hardened into caliche. Later fracturing let wind and water wear the more humid country to the east down into the lower plains, leaving the drier Llano Estacado standing high and dry.

What the plaque says

The Caprock A range of flat-topped ridges and cliffs stretching from Texas panhandle to 20 miles South of this point and extending into new Mexico. The name also refers to tough limestone that caps ridges. Rising sharply 200 to 1,000 ft. above plains. This section, Concho Bluffs, Marks Western edge of Caprock escarpment. Called the "Break of the plains" because it divides the staked plains from the north central plains of Texas. Observed by Coronado's expedition, 1540-1540, provided shelter in storms, but delayed entrance of settlers to staked plains. Herds of stampeding cattle at times plunged over its edge. In the area, the Caprock blocked eastbound wagons, including some from California gold fields in 1850'a. Because of scarce surface water, staked plains were too dry for farming or ranching until wells were drilled and windmills installed. Ridges and canyons here hindered railroad building. In 1881 workmen earned $2.50 a day-highest wages ever paid until then on a texas railroad job-at "Colt's Big Rock Cut" (the mile-wide, 17-ft. chasm visible here). A tragic accident with dynamite injured several of Colt's men and killed three. Their graves, known to the pioneers around Odessa, were on a hill northeast of the tracks, but cannot now be found. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Odessa Meteor Crater — 4.4 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• White-Pool House — 13 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Monahans Sandhills State Park — 18 mi
  A small corner of a 200-mile dune field east of the Pecos, where fresh water lies just under the sand and a forest of shin oak grows no higher than your knee.
• Million Barrel Museum — 22 mi
  An oil reservoir that could not hold oil, then a water park that lasted one day, now a museum in Monahans with the story of the Pyote bomber base beside it.

More markers nearby

• Penwell — 3.5 mi
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 4.5 mi
• Captain Randolph B. Marcy's Southern Route Expedition — 9.8 mi
• Well's Point — 10 mi