Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Headlamps

Doing my first one day trip up the mountain on August 25th. I'll be heading up alone and using a headlamp for a 2:00AM departure. I went to REI and tested headlamps and found a variety of options. The LED lamps give plenty of light and I know they are more battery efficient than the brighter Xenon bulbs. The xenon bulb seemed to be the way to go for trail light however, this comment is based on testing it in a dark room. There will be minimum moonlight on Aug 25th so I will be dependent on the light. Any advice? Don't mind bringing extra batteries for the Xenon. Thx

How's your night vision? I used an LED unit and found it adequate. In fact, I liked the "softness" of the light on the trail. I'd also consider how comfortable one or the other unit is to wear for three hours. While you may encounter tree roots or rocks in the trail, and you'll have to cross creeks and creekbeds in the dark, the lower 1/3 of the trail is pretty easy to walk. I'd go for comfort, weight, reliability.

I use my LED headlamp when I am going on trails that are bullet-proof easy to follow and my heavy old Petzl with the big battery and bright incandescent lamp when it is harder. I also have a headlamp with both an LED lamp and an incandescent that I use when I only need the bright light for certain sections and just carry extra batteries (try the Litium batteries, they are lighter, last longer and don't freeze).

I made the totally switch over to LED this summer. I have a Princeton Tec Aurora and Matrix. The light is adequate and the battery life superior. You might want something a bit brighter on a x-country route, like the MR but the main trail isn't exactly pristine wilderness.

Bill

Last Sunday we left whitney portal at 1:45AM with no moon. The LED are definately the way to go. Light weight and their light isn't one pointed beam but difuse and strong enought to see the trail.

However, your August trip will be close to a full moon. Bring a light, but consider not using it once your out of the trees. Any light will keep you from seeing more that a few yards. If you use moonlight you call seem much more.

Thx for the info. My night vision is excellent and I'm familiar with the trail. When you're testing the lights the natural tendency is to go with the brighter which is what I was leaning towards. Of course they have the combo LED and Xenon units to give both features. I guess the diffused light would be more beneficial then a brighter focused light. One more question.....do the battery units on the head strap get annoying after awhile? They had one newer unit that puts the battery pac on your belt which look good too.
Anyone going up on the 25th of August? Thinking of leaving about 0200 or so.

I've got a Princeton Matrix which has decent light and excellent battery life. It has the integral battery unit of the type I believe you are asking about. I have found it just slightly noticable but still like it better than one with the remote battery pack. The two AA's don't weigh that much and I wasn't thrilled about a wire to get tangled up in. I normally turn my hat around baseball catcher style and put the headlamp straps over the hat. This allows for a little tighter fit without having the straps dig in to your head.
One more thing about headlamps that I think people need to get used to is not to look your hiking partner or other hikers/climbers in the face. Can't tell you how many times I've had my night vision wiped out by someone else. It is always natural to keep a hand held light pointed off to the side but since the headlamp follows your stare we sometimes forget.

I used the halogon Princeton Tec Solo last year and it give the brightness I like. The blue light of the LEDs give me a headache. I wish there were a red LED lamp you could hike with, no eyeball ache would occur.

Trouble with halogen is you will run out of 2 AAs in 2 hours. If you go with krypton or xenon instead you aren't compromising really that much weight, IMHO.

LED so-called "white" light claim over 100 hours of light, which is true, but one company (I think it was Petzl, I forget now) say that there are only about 10 hours of "bright light" and almost 100 hours of "useful light" and they say right on the package that "useful light" is defined as "just enough light to find new batteries in your back pack."

How's that for honesty, eh. I gave two headlamps away for X-mas last year, and I have noticed that after about 10 hours their LEDs drop dramatically in intensity.

Not good for slow hikers like me. I'll carry extra batteries and feel a tiny bit safer.

To each his or her own!

I probably will screw up the technical explanation but the Princeton Matrix was advertised as having a converter that utilizes pulse-frequency modulation (PFM) which is, according to them, supposed to sort of electronically fool the battery so that it doesn't have the drop off in power that HOYL described. CONSTANT level of light for 40 hours is advertised. Now this could all be some manufacturer's hype and when I see terms like pulse-frequency modulation I wonder if it is as useless as the new super-duper titanium drill bit the guy at Home Depot tries to sell me.

Scott,

The pulse technique you described is valid. The circuit adjusts the pulse width to get more current out of the battery as the voltage drops. The goal is to pull the same power out of the battery regardless of the voltage, so the light maintains the same brightness. Sounds like a great product if it really can go 40 hours at normal brightness.

Ken,
Thanks for the info! Just to satisfy my curiosty and to validate (or not) Princeton's claim I'll load my light with two fresh batteries, turn it on, and check it again tomorrow morning. It will be a somewhat subjective analysis and not much of a statistically valid sample but good enough for a rough idea of its performance. I'll report back. I have used their dive lights on SCUBA trips and they have always been first rate, functioning as advertised.

OK well here's one for you. One of the persons I gave the X-mas gift to was my mother, who left it on as a night light for a couple of her baby critters (goats) and then somehow the goats played with it and it was buried under bedding.

Three days later she found the headlamp...still burning, not very bright, but as she told me, the light was still "useful." She was without her headlamp for 3 days but there must've been a glow under the straw?

I dunno...she agrees that it's about 10 hours of great light and, well, at least 72 hours of "useful!!!"

Take this for what it's worth. And never loan your headlamp to a curious kid caprine.

(Petzl Tikka, BTW)

One thing to consider is the trail condition and how well "marked" or worn it is. I hace an LED with an interchangeable headlamp to a XENON bulb and have found that each has its time and place. I used the LED on a moonlight hike up Whitney last April and at a few points turned it off becuase it was so well lit. At a few points when I needed some detail and the moon was behind a peak, I needed to switch to a XENON. In short, if you can get one that has both I would highly recommend it.

The best time to hike at night is when their is a full moon. Im hiking up Whitney on the 13th for the first time. I have been waiting for this trip for a long time. See you on the top.

Finished the test last night at midnight. Forty hours prior to that I had loaded two new Duracell Alkalines in my Princeton Matrix with PFM (see Kenn+5 post) to test the forty hour claim of no drop in output. I'm happy to find it was exceeded. At midnight last night (40 hours) I still had the original intensity from the lamp after leaving it on for 40 hours. Don't know exactly when but it went out some time between midnight and 6AM today. This was like a little home science project so here is how I tested output. When I initially powered up I held a hand held light meter, from the days when my camera didn't have a built in meter, up on the face of the light's lense and logged the light level. I recorded the value. There are better ways to measure light but this was the best I could come up with at home and stay away from a very subjective evaluation. I checked the light from time to time over a 40 hour period and the value remained constant. Thought this was a pretty good check of both battery life and headlamp output. BTW, this test was with the LEDs and not the halogen.