Concho Billy Trail to Monument Lake Campground - Blog

By:  BW Admin  (3/22/2014)

Date:  3/9/2013 - 3/10/2013

We left a vehicle at the start of the Concho Billy trailhead and followed the road that starts the trail for about a mile or two, and then from that point we veered off into the wild blue yonder and had to blaze our own trail. We had a general path mapped out in advance on the GPS that would take us to monument lake campground with a night of camping planned for somewhere in between. A member of our party scanned the route ahead of time using google maps terrain view and was able to reasonably predict where there would be some good higher ground camping spots around the midway point. As far as the scenery goes I’d have to say if you hiked in for about a half a mile and replayed this on a continuous loop you would have the 15 mile hike we did. Grass fields, pine trees, cypress grove, repeat cycle. Not a noteworthy landmark of any sort. There is some beautiful stuff out there though especially when you venture through some of the more accessible cypress groves.

I never at any point felt I couldn’t have headed south and easily found my way to Tamiami Trail without a GPS, map or compass but there is probably a corpse or two out there that had similar notions. We were able to mostly keep our feet dry by going around water obstacles but it would have been a lot quicker to just plow through the knee deep water we encountered in spots.

We saw cotton mouths pretty much every time we ventured into a cypress grove where there was water so keep your eyes peeled. We couldn’t find a campsite that wasn’t covered in dry grass so making a fire was questionable at best.

On the way out we came across an access road and decided we’d had enough trail blazing for one trip and followed it all the way out to monument lake campground where we had left a second vehicle.