Guadalupe Peak, Texas' highest mountain at 8,751 feet, rises over one of the most scenic and least-known hinterlands of the old frontier. Behind and to the right of 8,078-foot El Capitan, the sheer cliff that marks the south end of the Guadalupe range and towers more than 3,000 feet above this spot, it overlooks mountains whose stark exterior conceals watered canyons shaded by ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, juniper, and quaking aspen. McKittrick Canyon contains a four-mile trout stream and the state's only herd of wild elk, while deer and turkeys abound. Stories of hidden gold in the Guadalupes reach back to Spanish days, when conquistadors riding north from Mexico wrote of fabulous deposits, and Geronimo said the richest gold mines in the western world lay hidden there; legend also says that Ben Sublett, a prospector of the 1880s, secretly visited a cave at night and returned with bags of nuggets. The archaeology of the Guadalupes is less known than that of any other area in the Southwest, but excavators have found spearheads, pictographs, human remains, and bones of long-extinct bison, dire wolf, and musk ox in cliff caves, while carbon-14 dating at Hermit Cave in Last Chance Canyon indicates occupancy 12,000 years ago. Geologically, the Guadalupes expose the famous Capitan prehistoric barrier reef, regarded as the most extensive fossil organic reef known, formed during the Permian Period some 200 million years ago.