I don’t enjoy being a Debbie Downer or a Negative Nancy, but I also don’t want to dance around it, the Santanoni Range is rough. In terms of difficulty and length it is certainly up there, but what really puts this one over is the abysmal trail conditions. With the exception of the 2-ish mile service road that takes you in from the trail head, these herd paths are technical, rocky, slippery, muddy, wet and every other ADK description you can think of.

We’ve seen quite a bit of debate about the best order to tackle these in, and we ended up taking the express trail up to Santanoni first, having heard that it was the most technically difficult aspect of the climb. Whether or not that held to be true is debatable, there were several steep and technical scrambles going up and down both sides of the loop. 

The elephant in the room here is the bogs and swamps too and from Couchsacraga. They are genuinely the worst part of this, otherwise moderate, climb. Be prepared for some unpleasant wetness, and consider bringing a hiking pole to help you through the bogs. This is a draining experience and will almost certainly take about twice as long as you would expect for the relatively short distance.

Things around “Times Square,” the junction point from which all the peaks are accessible from, can be a bit of a maze; make sure you’ve got some method of orienteering for figuring this part out. The first few miles do have trail markers, but after the junction for starting the loop (the actual Santanoni Range), it’s nothing but herd paths.

• Another trail from the Upper Works, a unique location with generally open parking and generally unpopular trails (see Allen). On this particular weekend in July (2024), it was surprisingly packed.
• This was a VERY LONG DAY for us, about 13.5 hours in total, with 20 mins breaks on each peak. We kept a moderate pace, got passed a few times but we also passed a few others.
• Views from Panther and Santanoni are pretty great, not so much from Couchsachraga, which is almost entirely wooded.
• The mud and the bogs are a serious bummer here, come prepared for it to be unpleasant.
• Major streams flow down both sides of the loop, with great opportunities to refill on purified water.