The Beach Mountains are located on privately owned land roughly north of Van Horn in southwestern

Culberson County, Texas Culberson County is a county located in the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2020 census, its population was 2,188. The county seat is Van Horn. Culberson County was founded in 1911 and organized the next year. It is named for David B. Culbers ...

. The maximum elevation reached is above sea level. The Beach Mountains occupy a roughly circular area with a diameter of approximately , rising above the surrounding desert. Narrow passes separate the Beach Mountains from the Baylor Mountains to the north and the much larger Sierra Diablo range to the northwest.

Geology

The Beach mountain range is one of multiple isolated mountain ranges that populate

Trans-Pecos The Trans-Pecos, as originally defined in 1887 by the Texas geologist Robert T. Hill, is the portion of Texas that lies west of the Pecos River. The term is considered synonymous with Far West Texas, a subdivision of West Texas. The Trans-Peco ...

Texas. Other nearby ranges include the Sierra Diablo, Baylor, Apache, Carrizo, Wylie, Eagle, and Van Horn mountains. Although these isolated ranges may share some common characteristics, their underlying geology can vary significantly. The Beach Mountains are erosional remnants of

Ordovician The Ordovician ( ) is a geologic period and System (geology), system, the second of six periods of the Paleozoic Era (geology), Era. The Ordovician spans 41.6 million years from the end of the Cambrian Period million years ago (Mya) to the start ...

and

Cambrian The Cambrian Period ( ; sometimes symbolized C with bar, Ꞓ) was the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, and of the Phanerozoic Eon. The Cambrian lasted 53.4 million years from the end of the preceding Ediacaran Period 538.8 million ...

sedimentary rocks laid down from 541 to 444 million years ago. Along their western margins, a highly intermittent stream called Hackberry Creek has exposed even older

Precambrian The Precambrian (or Pre-Cambrian, sometimes abbreviated pꞒ, or Cryptozoic) is the earliest part of Earth's history, set before the current Phanerozoic Eon. The Precambrian is so named because it preceded the Cambrian, the first period of the ...

deposits.

Flora

The vegetation of the Beach Mountains is typical of the

Chihuahuan Desert The Chihuahuan Desert ( es, Desierto de Chihuahua, ) is a desert ecoregion designation covering parts of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. It occupies much of far West Texas, the middle to lower Rio Grande Valley and the lo ...

with plants such as

Yucca ''Yucca'' is a genus of perennial plant, perennial shrubs and trees in the family (biology), family Asparagaceae, subfamily Agavoideae. Its 40–50 species are notable for their Rosette (botany), rosettes of evergreen, tough, sword-shaped Leaf, ...

creosote Creosote is a category of carbonaceous chemicals formed by the distillation of various tars and pyrolysis of plant-derived material, such as wood or fossil fuel. They are typically used as preservatives or antiseptics. Some creosote types were ...

mesquite Mesquite is a common name for several plants in the genus ''Prosopis'', which contains over 40 species of small leguminous trees. They are native to dry areas in the Americas. They have extremely long roots to seek water from very far under grou ...

, and various

cactus A cactus (, or less commonly, cactus) is a member of the plant family Cactaceae, a family comprising about 127 genera with some 1750 known species of the order Caryophyllales. The word ''cactus'' derives, through Latin, from the Ancient Greek ...

species. The shallow soils along the steep and rocky slopes also support

live oak Live oak or evergreen oak is any of a number of oaks in several different sections of the genus ''Quercus'' that share the characteristic of evergreen foliage. These oaks are not more closely related to each other than they are to other oaks. ...

pinyon pine The pinyon or piñon pine group grows in southwestern North America, especially in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. The trees yield edible nuts, which are a staple food of Native Americans, and widely eaten as a snack and as an ingredient in New ...

juniper Junipers are coniferous trees and shrubs in the genus ''Juniperus'' () of the cypress family Cupressaceae. Depending on the taxonomy, between 50 and 67 species of junipers are widely distributed throughout the Northern Hemisphere, from the Arcti ...

, and various grasses.

Fauna

The Beach Mountains are home to rare herds of

desert bighorn sheep The desert bighorn sheep (''Ovis canadensis nelsoni'') is a subspecies of bighorn sheep (''Ovis canadensis'') that is native to the deserts of the United States' intermountain west and southwestern regions, as well as northwestern Mexico. The ...

(''Ovis canadensis nelsoni''), which tend to be restricted to the mountainous parts of

Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The many rugged escarpments and the highly dissected and eroded conditions within the Beach Mountains produce a rough and precipitous terrain that is highly favored by mountain sheep. Once extirpated, 38 desert bighorns were reintroduced into the Beach Mountains by the government of Texas in 1991 and 1992. In 2009, the Beach Mountains sheep formed part of a population numbering almost 1,200 in several mountain ranges in western Texas.Bailey, V. 1905. Biological survey of Texas. United States Department of Agriculture, North American Fauna no. 25. 222 pp; "Desert Bighorn Sheep", https://tpwd.texas.gov/landwater/land/habitats/trans_pecos/big_game/desertbighornsheep/, accessed 21 May 2018.

Proper name

The mountains are named for J. H. Beach, who settled in the area in the 1880s. Another early settler of Van Horn, Robert K. (Bob) Wylie, gave his name to another nearby mountain range: the Wylie Mountains, located to the southeast of the Beach Mountains.

References

External links