Monument Lake

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I stayed in Boy Scouts until our troop fizzled out when I was a softmore in high school. Here is the story of one of our trips.

 

 

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Monument Lake

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When I was 15 years old, I was in a small explorer scout troop in Phillips, Texas, that met once per week at the troop leaders house who was named Kruckenburg. Occasionally we took a scouting trip, but Mr. K wasn’t too much of an outdoorsman, so we usually went some place that had cabins that could be rented. He rented 1 cabin for him and us. He got a bed and most of the scouts slept on the floor or out side on the ground if it wasn’t raining. On this particular trip, he had rented us a cabin for three days at Monument Lake in Colorado about 30 miles west of Trinidad. There was seven of us that loaded up in Mr K’s station wagon with our sleeping bags, pocket money, and fishing gear. Mr K planned all the meals for the trip and bought all the groceries. We headed out on our adventure in high spirits looking forward on what was to come.

 

 

 

On the way up, we decided to drive up on Mount Capulin which was an old volcano located near Capulin, New Mexico. It was very cloudy that day so when we started getting near the top it was extremely eerie as we were right in the middle of a cloud and we couldn’t see 10 feet. When we got to the top, we were above the cloud and could see again. We all walked down inside and explored for a while and then hit the road again.

 

 

 A nice view of Mount Capulin in the morning. We drove up the volcano and explored down inside.

 

 

 

When we got to Monument Lake the place was absolutely beautiful and we knew right away it was going to be a great outing. The lake surface was like a mirror and you could see trout rising on the surface just aching to be caught.

 

Monument Lake was truly beautiful in the summertime and the fishing was great.

 

 

We unloaded our stuff and we were all ready to get out into the great outdoors, so we headed up the side of the mountain adjacent to the lake. We hiked about half way up and then headed back down. When we got back down, Mr K said he could hear every word we were saying all the up and back down the mountain. He said we were not representing scouting very well using all that foul language so everyone could hear.

 

 

The cabin we stayed in was small, but it had everything we needed and plenty of room for all of us on the floor.

 

 

The next morning, a kid named Johnny and I rented a canoe for the day and took off fishing for trout. Some of the other guys rented them just to play in. We caught a limit of trout and had a great day on the beautiful lake. Mr K was doing all the cooking and the scouts were doing the clean up after the meals. He cooked up the trout with fried potatoes for one of our meals. The next day we messed around fishing off the bank and messing around the area checking out the wildlife. We headed home about noon.

Fishing all day out of a canoe was the Highlight of the trip for me. We had a great time out on that beautiful lake.
Thanks for reading Monument Lake,
Bill