About 10 miles south of Van Horn, Texas, the Van Horn Mountains rise abruptly above an intermontane plain and extend southward to the Sierra Vieja. The area lies primarily in the southwestern part of Culberson County but extends into Hudspeth and Jeff Davis counties. The mountains owe their present topographic form to late Tertiary block-faulting. Structurally, they are a northward-trending horst which is flanked on the east and west by intermontane basins.

The Ogallala formation extends from the north side of the Pecos Valley northward across western Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska into southern South Dakota. With its southern limit within the Edwards Plateau, it underlies the upland surface of much of the High Plains section of the Great Plains Province. The extensive fluvial deposits of Neogene age are widely exposed throughout the dissected plateau region that flanks the Rocky Mountains on the east. The deposits have yielded large faunas of fossil vertebrates and mollusks and an abundance and variety of fossil plant seeds.