Trail blazing
Trail blazing or way marking is the practice of marking paths in outdoor recreational areas with signs or markings that follow each other at certain, though not necessarily exactly defined, distances and mark the direction of the trail.
"Blazed" redirects here. For other uses, see Blazed (disambiguation).
A blaze in the beginning meant "a mark made on a tree by slashing the bark" (The Canadian Oxford Dictionary). Originally a waymark was "any conspicuous object which serves as a guide to travellers; a landmark" (Oxford English Dictionary).
There are several ways of marking trails, including paint, carvings, affixed markers, posts, flagging, cairns, and crosses, with paint being the most widely used.
Prominence[edit]
In US wilderness areas, whether state or federal, the US Wilderness Act requires that the land seems "untrammeled by man," and so blazes are often kept to a minimum. By contrast, in a typical municipal, county, or state park, or any land open to a wide variety of users, or in a well-developed metropolitan area, blazes will be more frequent.[12] Single-track hiking trails also receive more blazes than those that follow old roads or other more obvious routes.