Monjeau Lookout

Several weekends ago we headed up to Ruidoso to spend some time in the mountains and hopefully find some fall colors. Once we got to Ruidoso on Saturday we spent the afternoon walking around town; there were a few too many people for my taste, most of them from Texas (it's easy to tell a Texan; they almost all had on some piece of apparel from the University of Texas; not to mention that nearly every parked car had Texas plates). Anyways, despite the people, it was fun. Sunday morning, however, was the real reason we headed for the mountains. We decided to drive up to the Monjeau Lookout, a fire tower constructed by the CCC in the 1930s. The tower is accessible by a nice winding forest road that leads up to over 9,000 feet. This area was hit by a wildfire several years ago so many of the trees are still black and without vegetation; however, as we climbed we did get into some aspens and saw some fall colors we had been hoping for. Aspens, for whatever reason, are my favorite tree and to me there's few things better than a grove of aspens in the fall. That's one of the things I missed most about the west while living in Oklahoma. The lookout is still closed to the public (at times it is open so one can actually go inside the tower) after the fire. It appears to be completely restored after the fire damage, at least from the outside. It is built out of stone and thus the structure itself was able to survive the fire.