Ridecamp: Re: Re:[RC] Trail Marking

Good ideas that turn out to be bad ideas:

Yellow marking ribbons

Reason:  sunlight through green leaves creates a yellow
"halo" around the leaves.  The yellow ribbons disappear
into the yellow halos.

Red/Black striped marking ribbons

Reason:  can you spell "camouflage"?  The red just
doesn't show up, and the black melts into the
shadows. 

Yellow/Black striped marking ribbons

Combine both reasons above.  There's one ride manager
around here who always marks this way and one
simply can *not* persuade her that it's a bad
idea.

The problem with trail marking is that it's hard to
figure out what you've done wrong until the ride is
in progress and the first people come back and
start telling you how they got lost.  The worst
mistake I ever made as a trail marker was putting
up a sign on the dirt road into the camp.  The riders
were going to be departing along the same dirt road,
so I put up a hand-lettered sign taped to a step-in
plastic fence post that directed the arriving rigs to
 "Go slow.  Horses on road."  I didn't look at the
*back* of the piece of 8.5 x 11 laminated plastic sign
I had grabbed out of my marking box.   It was printed
with a big arrow that pointed the departing
riders in exactly the wrong direction; telling them to
turn right as they left camp when they should have turned
left.  Miraculously, it only screwed up two groups
of riders.  Everybody else followed the day-glo
orange surveyor tape like they were supposed
to.

Linda B. Merims
lbm@xxxxxxxxx
Massachusetts, USA




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