Table Top Mountain

Duane's take

Well, the marker tells it this way, and I'm just the voice carryin' it down the road. Out here in Upton County, there's a formation that'll stop your eyes cold if you're not expecting it. Table Top Mountain.

A round, flat-topped mesa rising four hundred and seventy-five feet above its base. Just sitting there, patient as anything, like it's been waiting for you to notice it. And friend, it has been waiting.

A long, long time. We're talking one hundred and fifteen million years. That's how old the rock at the top of that mesa is.

Limestone, laid down back when this whole stretch of the Permian Basin wasn't sun-cracked caliche and scrub brush. It was a prehistoric sea. A sea.

Right here. Where you're driving. The buttes and mesas you see scattered across this county, Table Top among them, those are remnants.

Survivors. They're what's left of a sheet of rock that once covered this entire county, and most of it has been eroded away over the ages. The land itself wore down and blew off and washed out, until only the hardest, highest pieces remained standing.

So that flat top isn't an accident. It's armor. The limestone held on while everything around it gave up and went.

Four hundred and seventy-five feet of mesa, part of an uplift in the Permian Basin, and it's been standing there since before anything with a backbone walked on dry ground. Next time you think something in Texas is old, Table Top Mountain would like a word.

What the marker says

Round, flat-topped mesa rising 475 feet above its base; part of an uplift in Permian Basin, which was once a prehistoric sea. The limestone-topped buttes and mesas in this area are remnants of rock that covered county 115 million years ago, but has now been mostly eroded.