Guadalupe Mountains

Every photographer eventually builds a list of landscapes that exist in genuine geological relationship with each other. Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park are the above and below of the same ancient story — the Capitan Reef, a massive coral reef that grew at the edge of an inland sea 265 million years ago and now forms both the cave systems of Carlsbad and the mountain mass rising from the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas.