- Colored Flour: Buy ~5lbs for each trail (Eagle and Turkey). Color your flour if you plan to be in an urban or residential neighborhood. You can use either carpenters chalk (available at hardware stores) or tempera paint (available at craft stores). Use chalk sparingly for true trail marks, bad trails, etc. Chalk tends to dissipate quickly during rain and heavy foot-traffic.
- No White Flour: Since Muggles insist on identifying any white powder as anthrax, color your flour! There is no such thing as orange anthrax. Pick a color that is appropriate for the time of day and environment (i.e. red in a leafy forest during autumn is a bad choice).
- Do Not Use Flour Around: Sensitive federal buildings where they don’t have a sense of humor, like the White House, Capitol, FBI building, Ronald Reagan Building, etc. Use chalk instead.
- Trail Marks: Know the DCH4 trail marks before you set trail–this is not a good time to learn on the job. Mark the trail cleverly, but not impossibly. Hash marks should be about every 50 feet–closer in tall grass or nasty shiggy. Plan your checks well; true trail should pick up somewhere within about 100 feet of a check. After 3 marks, the pack should expect they are on true trail–this is the time to give either a true trail or bad trail mark.
- Pre-Laying Trail: If you pre-lay the trail, plan at least two hours to comfortably lay trail, get lost, take a break to skinny-dip, re-lay your co-hares’ bad marks, fight about where to send true trail, complain about too many/too few hare’s arrows and still finish in time. Do NOT split the trail up and all lay different sections: it makes for a fu*ed up trail, it’s no fun, & all the hares don’t know the whole trail and can’t help stragglers.
- Live Haring Trail: You will have definitely needed to have scouted thoroughly and have a very specific and thought out plan for laying your trail.
- Sweeping Trail: You should attempt to have at least 1 hare sweep the trail at the end of the pack to make sure all checks are marked correctly & steer the main pack back on trail due to your crappy marks. At the end, check with your sweeping hare to make reasonably sure all hashers made it back. If anyone is absent, you are responsible for sending out a search party.
- Inclement weather: If it’s pouring rain when you set trail, go to plan B, whatever that is. (Secret: Self-rising flour sticks around a bit longer during rainstorms.) It may mean setting the trail live, or putting down tons of marks & sweeping with the pack to keep them on trail. ..flour endures rain OK, chalk evaporates in seconds, so trail marks may need to be set all in flour instead.
Other Trail Considerations
- Trail Length: DCH4 is graced with the presence of a substantial walking crowd, so for God’s sake don’t piss ’em off!! You should plan a trail that will have the walkers and runners arriving at the beer check and end at approximately the same time. DO make sure they get to the beer & shots. DON’T detour them around all the shiggy.
- No Trail On: Private Property without the landowner’s permission.
- Safety: While we may joke that safety is 3rd, the hares have a responsibility to ensure safety on trail.
- The most dangerous hashing area is major/dangerous roadways. Don’t take the pack across dangerous streets without obvious marks. If you have to cross a big road, find a tunnel or do it at a light/crosswalk and mark it clearly–avoid blind curves, hills, etc.
- Clear the barbed wire, jagged metal, debris, large rocks, or dead whores from the creeks and tunnels before sending us through!
- Don’t have the pack running around high-speed railroad tracks solving some stupid check