Hiking Trail Markers - You Don't Want to Get Lost!!

Our Trails Deserve Beautiful Signs

Whether you are hiking, hunting, bicycling, riding on horseback or participating in motorized recreation, nearly everyone uses trails for a similar goal – to spend time outdoors.

Trail markers are an important tool for these activities and are used to help stay on the right path, avoid hazards and to keep you from getting lost. Trail markers come in a variety of shapes and sizes – and even colors (they aren’t always orange!)

Types of Trail Markers

There are several ways of marking trails: paint, carvings, affixed markers, posts, flagging whiskers, flagging tape, cairns (rock piles), and crosses, with paint being the most widely used.

At Elusive Hunter, with our Trail Chasers® brand ground markers, we use flagging whiskers combined with either lightweight stakes for easy carry or our upgraded hard ground stakes for compacted soil or gravel. The trade-off is weight; the hard ground stakes weigh three times as much as the lightweight version.

Trail Marker Colors

Trail markers typically come in four different colors: orange, red, yellow, and blue.

Orange trail markers that are widely used in hunting and on state park/forest hiking trails. Orange is universal and easy to see. Orange flags, whiskers and paint in trail marking is a color that generally holds up well against UV fade. Color tests show orange will last a year or so before fading.

Red trail markers are used to mark mixed use trails meaning bikes, horses, and foot travel all are fair game on the trail. Red pigments in marking flags, whiskers and paint don’t hold up as well as orange. Color tests show fade beginning in a few months and show only a trace around nine months out.

Yellow trail markers represent local hiking trails for foot travel only. Like Red, the natural paint pigments will begin to fade rapidly, but do hold on to the color for roughly nine months

Blue trail markers are typically used to represent ski trails. Blue colored flags, whiskers and paint will generally hold up for a year or more.

Member of the Trails Community

We are a proud Trail Supporter of American Trails the national organization working on behalf of all trail interests. American Trials is passionate about trails and the positive impact they bring to all communities. Based in Boulder, Colorado American Trails is one of the world's most comprehensive online sources for planning, building, designing, funding, managing, enhancing, and supporting trails, greenways, and blueways. https://www.americantrails.org/

Our Trail Dogs

Our trail dogs for this post are: Cody, named for Buffalo Bill Cody of the American Wild West days and is our over-energized two and a half year old Golden. He’d run the River Trail ten times over if we let him. Cleaver is our six year old mellowed-out Flat Coated Retriever. He’s a rescue from the Republic of Turkey. He’d just as soon chill out strolling the trail.