Hiked by: Tim and Valerie on January 5, 2008 - via Mt Percival trail, Crawford Ridgepole Trail and Mt Morgan Trail
Conditions: Arrived at the parking lot just a few minutes after 10AM. We were just planning to hike Mt Morgan today, but the (very pleasant) crowd of 16 that was heading up that trail as we arrived caused us to change the plans slightly. We used the Morse Trail (?) to cut over to the Mt Percival trail and went up that instead. It was a beautiful, easy snowshoe through the woods for a long ways. Eventually, though, it's necessary to climb. And climb we did. It was very steep (almost too steep for the snowshoes in a couple places) and the snow was still very fluffy and loose. It appeared that only one other person had been on this trail since the snowstorm on 1/1-2.
At the top, Valerie announced that she couldn't go back down the way we had come up. Too steep. It's a LOT easier to climb UP in snowshoes than it is to go DOWN. The tail-ends of the snowshoes make it very difficult on steep sections. Anyways, she was not comfortable with the idea of coming back down that trail. Instead, we decided to take the Crawford-Ridgepole trail over to Mt Morgan, and then down the Mt Morgan trail. This had the added benefit of getting us back on the trail that we told our family we would be on, in case of emergency.
The trip across the ridge was really nice. Some ups and downs, and lots of deep snow drifts. Valerie went down onto her butt a couple times, but no real damage. We didn't go to the summit of Mt Morgan, due to time constraints, but instead headed down when we got to the intersection. The trip down went very quickly by comparison and we were back at the car before 2PM.
On the trip down, we found these GIANT paw-prints in the trail. They had obviously been made after the large crowd had gone up the Mt Morgan trail. We debated what made them - cat? wolf? bear? After following them all the way to the parking lot, we figured it must be a very large dog traveling with a hiker. Unfortunately, they weren't in the parking lot by the time we arrived.
Temps throughout the day were around 30 degrees.