The “Terrifying” Percival & Morgan

Another Squam Range hike! ⛰️ You know what that means…

The hike we did was not the hike we planned. It never is out here. 🤪

At least this one was not due to major problems on trail. Or TOO overambitious. 

We intended an out & back on Mt. Percival. We’d ascend the caves trail for Hummingbird’s T25 checkmark, and descend the cliffs trail, which I hadn’t done yet. That was the plan… 

Around 4.5 miles with less than 1400’ elevation….

The hike we actually did: 6.55 miles and 2060’. 

Not long into our adventure, we started discussing the idea of extending the hike to loop down Mt. Morgan instead of doing an out & back. We agreed to evaluate after summiting, but talked about the idea far too much for me to believe we wouldn’t inevitably do it. 😉

The Percival trail had more scrambly spots than I remembered along the lower main trail. This was a big part of our reasoning for potentially looping — a couple spots felt like they could be sketchy to descend with imperfect knees… especially after the other rock scrambles we did have planned! 

Several years ago, I hiked the Morgan-Percival loop with Hawk, descending the Percival caves. I was looking forward to doing them again in the opposite direction. 

Both mountains are on the Terrifying 25 hiking challenge list, which is rather aptly named. While definitely on the “easier” side (compared to other T25 hikes), Morgan & Percival are still potentially hazardous and tricky to navigate. They’re also a lot of fun. 

Getting footage of the cave sections is also tricky. You frequently need four points of contact while hiking, so whipping the camera out is only intermittently possible. Hummingbird and I snapped pictures of each other when it was safe to do so, but hikes like this certainly have you longing for a Go Pro headset (or whatever those gadgets are). Although knowing me, I would probably either whack it on the rocks and lose/break it or mainly get footage of my feet or the cave walls. 😂

Despite the photographic inconveniences, Percival was a fun trail and Hummingbird handled it all well. Physically, it felt slightly harder than I remembered it 6 years ago (how dare I age more in that time! lol), but I also held up decently overall. I took a “dead” picture at the summit viewpoint just for fun, but I actually felt ok at the time. 

Needless to say, we chose to continue to Morgan after taking in the view on Percival. The bad news is, this means I once again missed out on the cliff trail. Oh well, I guess we’ll just have to come back again for that! 😁 The good news is, tagging the T25 section on Morgan now meant we wouldn’t have to add it in on our longer and unfamiliar traverse from neighboring Mt. Webster. Actually, we won’t even have to go all the way to Morgan to clean up our redlining. So this worked out for the best. 

When we reached Morgan, we found our way down the bypass trail so we could approach the ladders & caves from below. No way in heck were we going DOWN those ladders! 

Our timing was perfect for a short break while we let a large group ascend before us. I figured watching them do it might give Hummingbird some comfort and motivation. Or of course it could totally backfire. But thankfully it worked out. 

The Morgan ladders separate and split off to the side part way up, requiring you to shift over. I am pretty sure SLA must have done some work on those ladders recently and added extra rungs & footholds to them. I swear they were MUCH further apart when I first did them 6 years ago! I vividly remember it being a full stretch for me to switch ladders. Now it’s a cinch for any length of arm & leg. 🤔 

Now on one hand, this almost negates their “terrifying” status (although probably not so much in an acrophobic’s mind, haha). But it’s definitely a valid safety measure, and certainly I was grateful for it. Besides, if someone wants maximum terror, they can just descend this route instead. Even with this improvement (whether real or imagined), I will not be doing that!

Past the ladders, you climb through a cave and then scramble over a large boulder pile. This is actually much harder than the ladders! Hummingbird (who’s several inches shorter than me) struggled a bit with the reach required for some of the scrambles, especially with her bad knee, but she eventually made her way up. I honestly didn’t have the easiest time either in a couple spots, but it was still fun. I’m just getting old. 

After taking a few more summit pics on Morgan, we hiked on to the bypass trail to once again start our descent, this time to the bottom. Or almost the bottom. Ironically, we cut across the Morse Trail to the Percival parking lot, where Hummingbird’s car was parked. It’s ironic because the last time we were here to hike West Rattlesnake, we decided to cross the street to tag Morse so we wouldn’t have to do it later. Even at the time we figured we’d end up repeating it like this, because that’s just the way things usually work out for us. Especially in the Squams. 

At least Morse is a nice trail. We finished up and I did some stretches while Hummingbird changed out of her hiking shoes. We had definitely hit our physical limits for the day, but all in all it was a great hike which I would still happily repeat. 

Hey, maybe after we’re done redlining, our Squam hikes might finally start going as planned for once!