Preparing to Hare
Hashing is a challenge between the Hares laying trail and the Hounds following trail. The Hounds are challenged both to catch the Hare and to eliminate all obstacles to beer, at a pace acceptable to them. The Hare should try to set the correct amount of obstacles for the hounds, and his real challenge is to please them. So while your Pack of Hounds is painfully drunk in the woods, the Hare is the least likely to find satisfaction.
With that in mind I'm writing this guide for Hares, focusing on estimating the pack, and rewarding their deviant tastes. Every Hash Club is different because every set of Hashers is different. If your club survives 10 years it will be a different club, because people change. This is why new trails are so necessary and sometimes desirable. You should ask these things about your hounds:

If you know all of these things you'll have an idea of where your trail should start (the ON-ON) and end (the ON-IN). This is the most important thing about any trail because it is your first and last impression on the Pack. Any kind of interesting thing will make an interesting trail: Forestry, Gay Bars, Strip Bars, Bars, Brambles, Bridges, Boulders, Brooks, Bird Refuges, Rivers, Refugees, Rural Refuse Recycling, Railroad Tracks, and even Hiking Trails work in a Hash. Past trails will affect attendance to your future trails, but the Pack's satisfaction with their experience centers around the end. The main priorities I use are beer, scenery, economy, comfort, privacy, and food. It should be comfortable enough to make them want to stay instead of taking their tired, bleeding, dirty and drunk bodies home at their first chance. I use percentage that stay more than an hour at the ON-IN as gauge of my success in haring.
While these priorities are may not be yours, they are something to keep in mind. Think about these or you will end up with a sober pack in the wrong part of town, without any money, getting mugged by the local street gang, while starving to death; and nobody wants that, right? However it has been argued successfully by the occasional hare that these just made for better obstacles. More often this argument was not successful and resulted in unpleasantries not suitable for print.
Some may debate this, but trail itself is not an obstacle. Using it as such guarantees shortcutting by the pack and is bad for the hares in the form of several odious situations; random shortcutting hashers find the hares faster, lost shortcutting hashers never see the trail the hares put hard work into, sometimes slow hashers are misplaced on/off trail, (how would YOU know), and are never seen again.
Fortunately the biggest mistake is also the easiest to avoid. Trail is the only control you have over the pack; do it well. Traditional trail marks are piles of flour larger than 2 inches in diameter, arrows made out of flour or chalk, and brightly colored ribbon. Checks are "X" s drawn in flour or chalk larger than 1 foot in diameter and are used to change direction of the trail without specifics. Placement of these is up to you, for your crimes and punishment. In short, if the Hounds don't stay on trail it is your fault.
When your average hound runs every day, marks in that hash may be more than 100 yards apart, on a straight and highly visible right of way; it happens. If your pack does all their running at the hash, marks every 100 feet might not be enough to keep them on trail. It’s your judgment alone that will bring them through your trail.
Sort your priorities, choose your beginning and end, look over your possibilities of travel, and then walk your trail. When you walk the trail look for shortcuts and interesting side paths, these will be the things people remember about the trail. Intended shortcuts can cut out boring sections and get the pack disoriented, making them more reliant on the trail. Walking the trail is the best time to find points of interest and possible beer check locations.

Keeping the slow and fast hounds together will buy you more time to lay trail, contribute greatly to the enjoyment of the pack, reduce the logistics of finding lost hashers, make for better tales of the trail, and give the impression your trail was actually well planned. At the end of the trail your pack should be drunk, uniformly exhausted, relaxed, and relieved. Now somebody else in the organization will have to make them alternate between silence and singing. Your job is done and you can find out where you went wrong.

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