Persimmon Gap

They rode through the narrow passage in the hot, dry, despoblado. Their European garments frayed and their gaunt sweatless bodies blackened against a blazing sun.

“Agua,” The head rider spoke just above a whisper.

“Si, agua,” repeated a lieutenant, leaning in his saddle.

The line of soldiers marching behind stopped and waited as the officers dismounted and led their horses to the trickling Maravillas Creek.

“Cabellos.” A soldier said, pointing to the white capped outcroppings in the near distant hills.

In the cut known as Persimmon Gap, just north of the Big Bend National Park, where the outlaying edges of the valley reveal geologic history as far back as 300 million years ago, an erosion resistant white mineral known as novaculite cabello tattoo the hills and are named after the 16th century Spanish explorers who thought the outcroppings looked like horses.

This range of novaculite is part of the Quachita Thrust Belt and represents the tail end of the Appalachian Mountains. After wandering subterranean through much of Texas, this ancient fold resurfaces just north of Marathon. The white-brown rock abounds in the Marathon Basin, a 30 by 40 mile stretch of land that consists of plains, hilly lowlands and low mountain ridges carved from folded Paleozoic Strata, a product of uplifting where powerful forces in the crust, thrust up older rock through the younger, primarily volcanic rock of the area.

And just a stone’s throw away, the Santiago Mountains loom in the west, representing the tail end of the much younger Rocky Mountains. The two prominent mountain ranges of the United States terminate here in the Trans-Pecos, separated only by a few miles and over 200 million years.