The Santanonis, oh my! (6/16/10)

Ahh, the Santanonis...loved, er ok bemoaned by so many. The mud, the muck and the trailess wanderings! If the Santas weren't muddy and challenging enough on a good day, myself and my hiking partners for the day Lisa and Debbie, were treated to a forecast of rain for most of the day. :/ We knew it was going to be a long day, so we got the required early start and picked our way through the mud and water filled "maintained" trail back to the start of the Time Square herd path. We spotted it easily and for the most part had no trouble staying on the herd path. After being told and reading how steep and rugged the trail was up to Herald Square, I didn't find it all that bad in regards to what you would expect to find on a Adirondack high peak. When we got to Herald Square, we took the right to Panther Mountain and 15 or so minutes later we were on our first high peak of the day. We had a few minutes of decent view from the top, before the rain and clouds moved in and eliminated any more views for the rest of the day. We quickly made our way over to the famous Time Square and hunkered down under some trees and ate our lunch and donned our rain gear. From there we forged on to everyones favorite peak, Couchsachraga haha! Between the rain and the rain covered trees and brush we had to push through we definitely got a bit wet. After picking our way over the bog, and winding over false peak and false peak, we hit the half way point and the summit of Couch. When we made our way back to Time Square, we were all pretty miserable and tired but we met a man coming off Santa who I think was more of both than us, lol. Ahh good times. Well, onward we went, into the wind and the rain and the clouds that enveloped Santanoni Mt. When we reached the summit we snapped a couple of photos of each other, looking like wet rats and started out final stretch back to the car. Absolutely zero view to be had, so I suppose a return trip is in order at some point.
The most rugged and steep part of the whole climb was without a doubt the decent of the "new-old" trail, including the use of a twenty food rope that was needed to scale a rock face. Once we actually had the rope in hand it was actually quite enjoyable! As we reached the base of the mountain we had the only time during the day that we couldn't spot the trail, and that was because the trail actually led through the middle of a pond/bog that was flooded. With a little bit of guided bushwacking we soon picked it up and hit the maintained trail and began our soggy death march back to the car. I won't soon forget our 14 hour trek through the Santas, and not all of it was bad. :)