Odessa, Texas map

Odessa sits on flat, treeless ground about 2,890 feet above sea level, west of Midland and east of the Pecos country. Andrews County is north up US-385, Winkler County west on SH-302, and the oil counties of Crane and Upton lie south. Big Spring is 60 miles east on I-20, Lubbock 140 miles north, and El Paso 285 miles west by I-20 and I-10.

Like Midland, the town began in 1881 as a stop on the Texas and Pacific Railway, named by settlers who thought the grassland resembled the steppe around Odesa. It stayed a small ranching town until the Permian Basin oil discoveries of the 1920s and the postwar boom, when the population multiplied several times over in a decade. Ector County, created in 1891, is named for a Confederate general.

Rainfall averages about 14 inches a year and the only trees that grow without help are mesquite. The county has no rivers and no natural lakes; water is piped in from reservoirs on the Colorado River to the east.

Ratliff Stadium, seating roughly 19,000, is where Permian and Odessa High play, and the 1988 Permian season became the subject of the book Friday Night Lights. The Ector County Coliseum on Andrews Highway hosts rodeo, the Permian Basin Fair and minor-league hockey, and the fairgrounds around it are the city's main event space.

Odessa has three campuses: Odessa College near downtown, the University of Texas Permian Basin on the west side — where a partial replica of Stonehenge stands on the lawn — and a Texas Tech health sciences campus. The Globe of the Great Southwest, an Elizabethan-style theatre modeled on Shakespeare's Globe, sits on the Odessa College grounds, and the Presidential Archives and Leadership Library is nearby on University Boulevard.

West of the city, off I-20, is the Odessa Meteor Crater, one of the larger impact craters in the United States. It is shallow and grown over — the rim rises only a few feet above the plain — but a short trail and a small museum explain what hit and when. Much of the county's population lives outside the city limits in West Odessa, an unincorporated area along SH-302 and Loop 338 with county roads instead of city streets, which is why Ector County's total of 165,171 runs well above the city figure.