Short walking trail at Coach Jack Quarles Park. Just to the right of it is a utility road which intersects the Montoya Drain.

Tucked away in the Riverbend area of El Paso is a park trail at the Coach Jack Quarles Park. (Coach Quarles led the Coronado High School football team to several championships. He later was hired to lead the football squad at Coronado High in Lubbock, Texas. I met him when I was teaching there. Good to see a park named for him.) The park is located at 4000 Little Ln. (MAP)

Two strollers walking NNW alond the Montoya Drain.

The trail is actually quite short. You can extend your walk by strolling along a portion of the Montoya Drain. I did so by going south to Sunland Park Dr. The park trail actually dead ends before the Drain. However, there is a utility road just a few feed south of the trail that one can walk and intersect the drain. My walk was short - about 20 minutes. I turned around at Sunland Park Dr. and returned to my car. However, one can select to walk farther by crossing Sunland Park or turning NW and walking through the Willows and Sunset neighborhoods. Next time, I’ll plan on doing a longer walk along the drain and earlier in the morning for some good birdwatching. (MAP of the Drain)

I saw only three other people but they were on the opposite side of the drain. That’s pretty good social distancing. I elected not to wear a mask on the trail since I was the only one on the path.

To the south one can see a cross section of Mount Cristo Rey. You are really looking at a big a blob of magma that pushed up rocks from the Age of Dinosaurs forming Mt. Cristo Rey. Fossils there include the world's largest oyster ever in the entire fossil record, giant sharks, dinosaur and crocodile footprints and a bunch of other invertebrate trace fossils. There's not much to note on your photo. Stay tuned for a new article about Mt. Cristo Rey coming out in the Journal of the El Paso Historical Society, written by Dr. Eric Kappus.

You can also see the northern tip of the Sierra de Juarez, also known as the Flores Syncline. A syncline is a big "U" shaped fold with younger layers of rock in the middle. These rocks are from the Cretaceous, the Age of the Dinosaurs, as well.