June 13, 2026

Start/End: Bradley Pond Trailhead

Peaks: Santanoni (4,607')

Elevation Gain: 3,090 ft

RT Mileage: 11.33 mi

Duration: 9 hours, 34 minutes

Rock Difficulty: Class 1+

It would be a waste of an Adirondacks camping trip to not bag at least one High Peak. The Santanonis were the closest High Peaks to our campsite on Lake Harris, and we originally planned to bag all three in the range (Santanoni, Panther, and Couchsachraga), but the terrain, bugs, and mud had other ideas.

After waking up at 5:50 AM, we made the short half-hour drive over to the trailhead. It was a beautiful Saturday morning, and about half a dozen cars were already in the parking lot when we arrived and set out on the trail at around 7:00. The first 1.8 miles of the hike follow a gravel road, making for quick progress. We then turned right onto the Bradley Pond Trail, crossing a wooden bridge over Santanoni Brook before beginning to gently ascend alongside the brook. Another 1.8 miles in, we reached a series of cascades.

Above the cascades, the Bradley Pond Trail enters the coniferous forest at around 2,700 ft and becomes significantly wetter and rockier, vaguely resembling the King Ravine Trail in the base of the ravine on Adams. After 0.2 more miles, we turned left off the marked trail onto the Santanoni Express bushwhack/herd path, crossing Santanoni Brook again, making our way through a marsh, and beginning to steeply ascend the northeast slopes of Santanoni towards the summit.

Santanoni Express, as the name suggests, follows essentially the steepest, most direct line up the drainage basin, making it wet, rocky, and rooty. The path is narrow, and navigating it frequently requires ducking under or brushing up against sharp branches. The only trail I have hiked in the Northeast that is remotely comparable is The Link on Jefferson. To make matters worse, it is currently peak bug season and a mix of mosquitoes, black flies, and gnats pushed what was already a slow, miserable experience far beyond the scope of even Type 2 fun.

The steepest section of the bushwhack spans from roughly 3,900 ft to 4,100 ft, including a couple of borderline Class 2 sections. After briefly flattening out at 4,100 ft, the bushwhack ascends steeply for another 400 vertical feet before gaining the north shoulder of Santanoni, leveling out, and merging with another herd path for the last 0.2 miles to the summit. We summited Santanoni just after noon, having taken over two and a half hours on the last 1.5 miles to the summit after leaving the Bradley Pond Trail.

At this pace, there was no way we were going to handle several more miles on herd paths over to Panther and Couchsachraga, and, exhausted mentally more than physically, we decided to call it and just head back down. On the way back down, we stopped at an outlook just north of the summit, which offered views of the main High Peaks region to the east as well as the other Santanoni Range summits.

The descent of Santanoni Express, expectedly, was just as slow and miserable as the ascent had been. We finally made it back to the marked Bradley Pond Trail only to find that the first few tenths of a mile were muddier and rockier than we remembered before finally veering a little further away from the brook onto drier, smoother terrain below the cascades. The rest of the descent was smooth sailing, and we were back at the parking lot at around 5:30 PM, and a hard-earned ADK High Peak #2 was in the books. Later in the evening, back at our campsite, clear skies and a new moon treated us to a gorgeous view of the Milky Way above Lake Harris, a much nicer view than anything we had seen during our hike.