A long Hash trail yesterday, despite us oldsters and a couple of newbies taking a bit of a “shortcut”. What we did was avoid some of the climbs but that added more distance. Still, I think we made the right call even though my group was the last to finish.

Leech My Nuggets was the Hare and as usual, he provided a well-marked and challenging trail without the insanity Vienna Sausage (Guenter) is known for. Well, Leech did do something I particularly despise–checkpoints. Five of them at least. A checkpoint is placed at an intersection with one or more other trails. Rather than clearly mark the direction to be taken, the Hare requires the Hashers to exhaust each possibility in order to determine the proper path. It is basically just a process of elimination–you walk up a trail and if you don’t see any marks for a while, you turn around and explore the next trail. So this adds both time and steps to the effort of completing the journey and is especially frustrating when you are already at the back of the pack. Checkpoints were originally intended to keep the Hashers in a tighter group by slowing down the runners and letting the walkers catch up. But they don’t work that way here because an important part of the equation is missing. The runners are supposed to indicate the proper trail once they find it, but that never happens because no one carries chalk or powder on trail. Anyway, I hate even one checkpoint, and having five to contend with kinda chilled my buzz.

Here are some photos from the day’s journey:

We’ll see what tomorrow brings.