Visitors to the Big Bend often ask me why Elephant Mountain (6,206 feet) is so called. It doesn’t look at all like an elephant from most angles. I think the answer is in this photograph taken about 23 miles south of Alpine in the evening sun in which the trunk is laid out along the horizon on the left and the eye is the left rock outcrop.
The outcrop is of a nepheline trachyte sill, 4 miles long, 2 miles wide and 1,200 feet thick, weighing about 3 billion tons. The rock cliffs you see towards the right of the photograph are also of the sill.
The mountain is in the 23,000-acre Elephant Mountain Wildlife Management Area. The main wildlife species are desert mule deer, pronghorn antelope, coyotes, scaled quail, rattlesnakes, whiptail lizards, spadefoot toads and bighorn sheep which were introduced in 1987. Texas Parks and Wildlife has a web page for the WMA.
