Well, I would recommend that you try a different marker like colored sand, but when people are calling the cops on suspicious lumps of guacamole, that probably won’t help.
The problem with that, beagledave, is that hashers are not actual hounds, and so don’t have the sense of smell necessary to follow a urine trail.
Besides which, I’ve never met the hare who was willing to go running through the briars and the brambles of the Georgia woods with his pecker hanging out.
I just got a message that the Norwegian embassy in Helsinki had closed down this morning because someone had spread a white powder in the neighbourhood. The Embassy Sectretary wasn’t too worried, though. He commented that it was probably someone that had marked a marathon trail (and there is a hash today).
BTW The hare at last Saturday’s run here in Stockholm used a homemade flourbag with a scull and two crossed bones together with the caption Anthrax.
I’m thinking I may lay my next trail with cornmeal. It has all the advantages of flour, but it’s yellow instead of white.
Zyada, sand is extremely heavy. The hare has to carry his trail-marking stuff with him, and often lays trails “live,” which means he has only a five-minute headstart on the pack and speed is important. Sand wouldn’t work.
1st thought: Not even hashers are that dumb.
2nd thought: What a stupid 1st thought. Of course they are.
Trail markings are supposed to be biodegradable and self-erasing, so flour used to be the perfect for setting trail, except when there’s snow - cocoa is good for that, btw. Paper was used by the very first hashers deep in Malaysia’s jungles, but having white termites to clean up is a luxury not shared by all.
Magic String would work, but it is a bit - messy, somehow. I like the idea of shaving foam, although the cans carry a sort of graffiti image.
But it is problematic - having law enforcement coming after us wasn’t unknown before, and it’ll probably become worse before it gets better. I mean, marking the trail with flour making the word “Hash” is probably not that much of an improvement
Just out of curiosity, Spiny Norman, is your SDMB name related in any way to your hash name?
Magic string, shaving cream, mustard: the problem with all of these is probably that they’re too expensive. For a 4-5 mile trail I typically use ten to fifteen pounds (4.5 to 7 kg) of flour. Flour is ridiculously cheap, so this is not a problem. A similar quantity of those other items would be much more expensive.
Here in Atlanta we do also use plain white toilet paper, because our trails are very woodsy and flour on the ground would be hard to see in underbrush. I suppose throwing squares on the ground even in open terrain would work, as long as it didn’t get blown away.
Nope, I’m known in those exalted circles as “Last Boy Scout” - boring handle, I know.
I share your worry about spending good beer money on trail markings. Hm. Wood chips, sawdust ? A bit harder to get by, but still cheap enough and probably not too anthrax-like.
Are these trails supposed to be ridiculously obvious? If so, what’s the point? Seems like you could just predetermine a spot to go drink beer and taking off running towards it.
The object is to get the trails as unobvious as possible, or put it this way: if a hash trail goes someplace where a normal jogger would run it’s purely by coincidense.
I almost made this a GQ, but figured that most of ur regular hashers are here now.
I normally use flour to mark my trails, but in light of the current white-powder scare I’d like to use something else.
I’ve been looking through the obvious alternatives listed above:
Shaving cream is too expensive. (and will it last if I set the trail the night before?)
Chalk only works in town.
Toilet paper wold blow away (and it’s not a pretty sight either…)
Then I wandered upon the website of the Montreal HHH, where they mention grated carrots.
Sounds like a cheap, albeit messy option.
Has anyone tried it?
How much would one need? (compared to flour)
How well does it stay? (does it get eaten by slugs in five meinutes, or will it still be there the next day?)
I just got the following forwarded email this morning, a dispatch from the “Hashers are too that dumb” department. I don’t know the source and can’t verify it yet on the Web (not surprising; it’s a pretty fresh story), but it seems plausible:
Idiots.
Here in Atlanta the word on the street is we’ll be switching to mainly chalk and toilet paper. That’ll probably do nicely. I can mark most of a trail with only one or two rolls of toilet paper, and a proper trail (by which I mean, six miles of briars and creeks) is better-marked by TP than by flour.
Cisco, part of the point is that you don’t know where the trail is going, and the hares try to trick and mislead the pack; that’s part of the fun. It’s no good if you know where you’re going to go.
[hijack]And frankly, this is why I don’t understand why most European hashers run A to A trails, which end at the same place they start. What’s the point? In Atlanta the trails are almost always A to B, so we truly don’t know where we’re going and our fate is entirely in the hare’s hands.[/hijack]
No problems really, I’ve mostly done A2A hashes, and I’ve never seen it as a problem. If you’re in an unfamiliar neighbourhood you’ll have no idea where you are anyway, and if the trail is A2B and you know the lay of the land you’ll have a pretty good idea of where you’re going to end.
I remember a visiting hasher from USA (he might even be from Atlanta), who disliked A2B runs very much, mostly for logistic reasons: When you’re through with the run you shouldn’t have to stand around for a long time waiting for your luggage to be shipped from point A.
