One of the things that has occured a time or two with the new gate marking system is folks running through a gate of another class backwards, not realizing there was a gate there as it was marked on the other side of the tree.

At the WR level the markers are put on those metal wickets and a triangle is on the front and a circle on the back to show which way to pass, but also I think, by being on the wickets you can see them from both directions to prevent accidently running between them.

I do not believe it would be practical to mark all our events with the wickets, particularly with the 6 lines we use.

I believe stapling them too tree's is going to remain the primary way of marking.

Something I did at this last fun trials though was to just mark the gates with various colored ribbon (red, white and blue) tied around the trees. It made the everyone's gates readilly apparent, regardless of the direction of approach.

Not sure if this could be applied to the STRA events, I am certain it could get VERY busy in a section with 6 different colors going on but it may be something to consider.

Just bringing it up as food for thought, the end of it all though is that the Trialsmaster really has to take everyone's possible lines into consideration while laying out the gates.

this is a sore spot for me, the gate marking system has been screwed with since i started trials back in 1989. i'm sure some of the old timers can talk about further mishaps as well.
i remember when the colored ribbon was used i think red on the right and blue on the left. after all these years it's still the same i miss my marker or sign or whatever regardless of the marking used sometime in an event in any given year.
every year people argue over which is better and someone thinks he has a new idea but it's always the same. the one point you bring up is the whole problem area in my book, too many lines in each section. it's a double edge sword. we have longer events with plenty of riding time and lots of riders, the downside is finding checkers multiple lines, sometimes of confusion.
i can't even keep up with current way of scoring i just ride the section and take what i get. maybe i'm just getting older and i'm just looking for some simple fun.
it's hard to layout sections that the upper classes can't use cheater lines er i mean creative lines. the lower classes are much easier to layout as they are mostly fewer turns and don't generally double back on themselves.
i havn't ridden any events yet this year and i'm looking forward to soon. i will also be helping to layout the mississippi event with clint, hopefully it will be a go. but it's always a challange to mark sections for intended line.
i hope it gets worked out. i'm sure more comments will follow


rob

after riding the newnan event this past weekend i can see a love hate thing happening with the gate marking. there were sections that had gates for different classes where you couldn't go through but all that would have been eliminated if they would just put a class letter on the arrow pointing in the direction that the trials master wanted the intended line. does that makes sense?
i think it also eliminates the ablity to ride a harder line if one felt inclined to. i try to do that from time to time to help myself improve. i also witnessed several riders getting 5 ed for riding through a diffent gate because it was on the back side of a tree they couldn't see.
rob

I like the gate system even though I got a 5 Saturday for going thru one backwards. I just didn't spend enough time learning the section. Not the system's fault, mine...

I like Alan's suggestion though of putting different colored ribbons around trees with gates on them.