oil smells like gas

i have a 94 jeep cherokee country with a 2.5 engine, has 175,000 on it. when i was changing my oil, i noticed it smelled like gas. anybody got any clues on how the gas is getting mixed with the oil?

Possibly from damaged cylinder walls or piston rings. Best thing to do is check cylinder compression on each one and you'll either see that they're all low or 3 will be normal and one will be very low. That's the only place that the gas and oil meet unless someone decided to pour gas in your oil system.

More than likely you'll find a problem with the engine running rich, faulty O2 sensor, leaking fuel injector, etc etc. Is the service engine soon light on? If so have the codes read and post them here.

sounds like your running really rich... any black soot around the tailpipe, did you gas mileage really drop off?

Another thought: if you started the Jeep up to move it to the oil change area and it hadn't warmed up, that may be the cause. I've been in touch with some oil sampling companies, and apparently at startup there's a lot of fuel dumped into the cylinders, and a lot of it makes it to the oil. It will get burned off after the engine warms up, so take that into account.