Around 5 years or so back, a young naive hasher named Byte My Yahoo, set a truly terrible run from Huay Tung Thao. The intention was good, but the outcome a disaster with hashers returning from all directions… Suckit summed it up in the circle pretty well with a “YOU SUCK!!!” splash that has meant the run hasn’t been forgotten. Why bring up a run from 5 years ago? Well, Stiff (along with Mr. Poo as co-hare) managed to pretty much copy that run. I offer that opening before being a hypocrite!
Huay Tung Thao appears to be a great place to set a run from – it’s convenient from town, well used, so there are trails around. From my experience it is quite a bit harder than it initially seems.
Mistake #1 – the run started with a circle check! Huh? The point of checks is to keep the pack together – a good check will slow the faster runners down and bring the pack back together. What does starting with a check do? It just scatters the pack from the beginning…
Mistake #2 – the call came from “the waterfall”. Yes… any run that heads up the waterfall is doomed to failure. There is no option apart from a hard slog up, or an ugly hack through the shiggy. I’ve spent a lot of time scouting to find an alternative, and so as I climbed the hill I was wondering what the fuck I was doing… It was the same climb I set 5 years back on a truly sucky run. And sure enough the turn back down the hill was at exactly the same point.
Mistake #3 – the Wimp trail – of course you don’t want to send the wimps up that hill, so a wimp option makes sense, but as we came down the hill we could hear the wimps calling more clearing than the rambos. Eitherway we knew we had to descend, so Graven and I came off the hill and randomly bumped into co-hare Poo stood on trail wondering why we were coming from a different direction, but as we found other hashers it was clear that was the least of the confusion. Everyone was confused. We were at the dam end of HTT reservoir.
Mistake #4 – Markings! So the rambo trail was on white paper, the wimp trail was on pink paper, both trails would be on white and pink paper, and they used powder in places that we would understand why they used powder…? We got down and guessed that we rejoined the wimp trail, so started looking for pink paper… no sign of that, so it was any kind of paper or powder or whatever, so sign of what to follow. We found something that might have been powder, but found a lot of pissed off wimp runners who had been searching for hours, or days there. Within moments we spotted some powder by the lake. Not easy to follow, but while the trail went along the shoreline, we went along the road spotting the odd bit here and there.
Mistake #5 – not enough trail! Partway down the lake we found clear evidence and Frozen Dick was FRB! A couple of pink strips hidden in the undergrowth. At this point it was still possible for the trail to do a figure of 8 and loop back along the aqueduct, but also possible to be just a boring loop around the lake. Some opted to head back, others opted to run around the lake. Graven and I did the latter, but meanwhile made some efforts towards trying to find trail. Evidence was scarce. One pink paper at the end of the lake had us confident enough that we had to go on around. We had different options for getting back, but chose to head over to the running track, and would you believe it, there was pink paper… Finally we were back on trail!!!
What can I say? I can’t say too much, as I’ve done pretty much the same… but that waterfall is cursed I tell ya, it’s cursed!!!