The Santanoni Range: Panther, Couchsachraga, Santanoni (27,28,29)

Headed out to the western-most of the High Peaks, also known for having some really swampy sections, but luckily for us, there'd been weeks of very little rain, so the terrain was OK.

The trail has a long, mostly flat lead-in, then a steep climb up to a spot known as "Times Square," because it's the intersection of the lead-in trail and the trails to the 3 peaks.

(Click to enlarge.)

These trails in the western part of the High Peaks region are less travelled and less maintained. The first bridge we came to was not kept up too well. The next one was worse.

 

The only person we saw on that first part of the trail was a guy hurrying to catch up to a scout troop then had started out earlier.

Unfortunately, we missed the turn-off to start climbing uphill and walked on for at least a half hour before turning around. From that point the climb was steep and before long, I was having a hard time with it. I was literally stopping every two minutes for a two-minute rest. (Ian was very patient.) When we finally made it to Times Square, we dropped our packs to take the short (15-minute) hike to the peak of Panther.

Times Square was a little bit like the real Times Square, in that we encountered a few groups of people, including a handful of 40-ish guys who were leaders or parents of a scout troop, but without any kids with them. I decided to leave my pack there again for the longer, but steeper, climb down and up to Couchsachraga. The low part of this trail is known as "The Great Swamp," but because of the drought, it wasn't too bad.

 

On the way we ran into the scout troop that had been ahead of us and discovered that one of the boys was in a class that Ian taught! When we got back to TS, we rested along with the scout-leader guys. We decided to hike together to the peak of Santanoni and hike out together. It was fun to have some additional people to hike with and useful, when they used their pump/filter to get fresh water from a stream and pumped some for us too.

13 hours of hiking; 17 miles (plus a few unplanned miles)