One problem with shooting at the 'golden hours' of dusk is that they are followed, often all to quickly, by the stygian hours of night. If one has hiked up to some lovely vantage point, one could find oneself in a difficult position with injury as a real possibility if one lacks a decent flashlight.
If your mental image of a flashlight is still the old Boy Scout 2D type that's pretty clunky, or an AA model that while fairly easy to carry but is barely brighter than a couple of candles, I'm here to tell you that the technology has really taken off in the last several years. I recently received a little pocket torch called a
Quark that is truly amazing. Here's what I got for $59 (USD) delivered:
A flashlight that's not much bigger than my thumb, weighs only a couple of ounces and is completely unobtrusive either in my pocket or next to my cell on its included belt holster. Yet...
On maximum highbeam it lit up the entire front of my neighbors house close to 100 yards away under suburban conditions, in really dark conditions I have no doubt that it would illuminate objects at a hundred yards or more away bright enough for easy identification. It will function at this level for over half an hour and has a regulation circuit such that it does not dim as the battery drains.
At lower levels, it is more than bright enough to find your way down a trail with a 13 hour runtime, and at still lower levels for tents or real emergencies it will literally (and I mean literally, not the figurative literal that is so often misused) go for days, in fact two and a half days continuously at 3.5 lumens and 15 days (!) at .2 lumens. Which might not sound like much but in a totally dark emergency scenario would be a heck of a lot better than nothing.
Furthermore, while I got the one that uses the less common CR123 battery, which is the smallest and lightest, they are also are made to take the far more common AA's. They are built as modules so I could for twenty bucks buy the AA body which fits my head. This would be useful if I was to travel to an area where AA batteries were all that were available. My understanding is that these is more most common size worldwide.
The link goes to the exact one I bought, but if you explore around you'll see that it really is a lighting system that lets you mix and match to a great extent. I have been in more than one situation where not having a flashlight would have left me in dire circumstances ranging from being up on a balcony in a windowless warehouse during a power failure to many times being caught out on a trail after nightfall, so I pretty much now always carry one. So I supposed I could have titled this 'meet my new best friend'.
