One of the most important thing a member of any Hash House Harriers group can do is to find new territory for the crew to do their meetups at. In Chiang Mai we have tons of options to the point where we get a bit complacent at times and stick to the stuff we already know because we have dozens of routes already. Every now and then though, someone will come along and decide to check out a new area and see if it would be conducive to doing runs there. We don't really have a lot of stipulations as far as new locations are concerned but if there were some it would be things like this
- It needs to be a reasonable distance from the city center so it can accommodate our busses
- We need to know that the people or government entities that control the land are going to be ok with 20 foreigners running around like loons there.
Recently, one such place was stumbled upon by a member when he went on some sort of nature something or other with one of his kid's class trips. Despite being a mountainous area, Chiang Mai is filled with places like the above. These are not natural bodies of water but we don't care. These were actually formed by people using the land as backfill or it was some sort of mining operation and it ended up filling up with water once the dams were built in Chiang Mai. While this is definitely not the kind of water you want to go swimming in and it can be really dangerous since it is nigh on impossible to get out of it if you were to fall in, they do look nice so we appreciate them.
Places like this are all over the place in Chiang Mai because there have been a lot of projects that were abandoned many years ago. The land also isn't usable for agriculture so for the most part it isn't used at all and therefore the people who do own it normally won't care if some people are trespassing on it, which we will be doing.
Because of the hilly nature of Chiang Mai, we always need to be a bit concerned about who is going to lay down the trail because there are some in our ranks that seem to get some sort of enjoyment out of making the pack go up and down a lot, truly testing the capabilities of our legs, including TipToe's.
While we haven't yet used this location for a trail run yet, the scouts who have been looking at it for several days now seem to think that there are multiple ways that this land can be used for a circle-style running trail. The best kind of land that we can possibly encounter would be one that has plenty of cleared areas mixed with real nature, road access, and also not a lot of people around that we could potentially disturb during our runs.
This one looks like it cold be really good for our local Hash and we hope to be using it in the rotation before the end of November. The people who came across it seem to be very excited about setting the first ever trail here and normally, this means that the hares will put in that extra care to make sure things go smoothly on our first trip there.
It could be exciting. I know that I am already excited about every meetup that we have but when it is completely new territory, this sentiment is shared by everyone in attendance.
We are doing 3 runs per week, minimum, every week for the foreseeable future. The full schedule is available here
ON ON!
