National Flashlight Day walk 2011

December 21st, 2011
Involved: Me (HDS 100Chc), Samy (HDS 120CThc), Dylan (Petzl headlamp).

This is old news now, but I completely forgot to mention the traditional night walk I took for the 2011 National Flashlight Day! I'll soon move this back to its proper date, but since it was so long ago I'll leave it up here for a little while before burying it.

For anyone not familiar with this wonderful holiday, this video should be everything you need to know:


I started the celebration with my traditional annual cleaning and lubricating routine.  I didn't do all of my lights because I've learned in years past that being unnecessarily thorough turns it into a real ordeal. Instead, this year I just selected the lights that see regular use and freshened them up with some Nyogel.

Here's the high CRI Clicky, ready to go.

And then around 10PM I headed out for a ranch walk with Samy...

and Dylan (who brought along his Petzl headlamp)...

and decorated pine trees in the middle of the nature preserve.

I mostly used my high CRI Clicky on 17670 body.  Sam used his Clicky.

For old times' sake, he gave it a good toss for us.

We ended up walking a narrow trail down the backside of the hill to the trail road that intersects with the highway.  Here we are walking blurrily through the night:

Along the way we encountered some impressively sized golden mushrooms.

And the old well, now covered.

It was a nice celebration of portable illumination.  We spent about an hour just wandering through nature and admiring our shiny toys with childish glee.

And then we packed it in for another year.  A good time was had by all and (hopefully) we all left thinking that we should make a point of taking another such walk soon.  Sadly, I now know that this would be the last such walk for a long time to come, and that Flashlight Day 2012 would go mostly uncelebrated.  It's so nice to get out in the quiet darkness and make use of our lights, I can't believe we don't go out and do this all the time.