For some reason, having a torch strapped to your head apparently makes you a nerd. I don’t see the correlation between hands-free lighting and nerdery myself but then I guess I wouldn’t.
I lived for years with a succession of torches. Then I went on a caving party weekend, where half the student cavers in the entire country camped in one small field in south Wales. We arrived in the dark – to tell the truth, we almost certainly set off in the dark – and I was lent a headtorch to help me put my tent up. Notice the lack of offer of help from the owner of the headtorch (the same person who once walked past me putting up that very tent in the dark and the rain at nearly midnight, remarked “You should get someone to help you with that” and walked away). I hung onto that headtorch for the entire weekend and by the time I got home, I’d fallen so much in love with it that I immediately bought myself one.
This is not that one.
LED technology has come in leaps and bounds in the last ten or fifteen years. When I started caving, we used Oldham-style lamps with twin halogen bulbs and waist-mounted batteries literally the size of bricks and got maybe four hours of light out of them if we were careful. By the time I graduated, we were using custom-designed headtorches with 7 (or 14, if you were rich) LED arrays (the old lamp pieces with new reflector fitted and the cable chopped mostly off) and small battery packs on the back of our helmets and getting a full weekend’s caving out of them. Even more if you had the lithium battery rather than the NiMH one (same person who owned the 14-LED array, obviously. Same person who repeatedly didn’t help me pitch my tent). I have no idea what they use now but it’s probably about 3 LEDs, brighter than the sun and powered by a battery the size of my thumbnail.
But that’s caving lamps. Every headtorch I’ve ever known came with LEDs but even so, I can see the difference in the technology. My second headtorch is merely the next generation of my first headtorch and yet it’s ten times brighter and the battery lasts so much longer. It’s cosmetically quite different as well – it has an easy-to-use rubberised button rather than a switch that jams if you get mud in it. It has a tilting mechanism built into the mount. It has one large LED with two lighting settings rather than three small ones. And it looks less battered because it’s never been in a cave.
Yes, I love a headtorch. I don’t carry it to the place where I will need it, I wear it around my neck. I even have a teeny-tiny emergency one (which, I admit, I’m not sure where it is right now) which needs a new battery because at the moment, the emergency needs to be in broad daylight.
I don’t cave anymore. I have no one to go with and caving solo is spectacularly dangerous. So my torches mostly get me around hotel rooms at night when the lamps have been badly positioned, or around campsites. I’m getting better at it but for years I wouldn’t go to London without a headtorch in my pocket in case, for whatever reason, I needed to get off the Tube and go off into the tunnels. I frequently carry one if I’m walking by the coast because in places there are caves and quarries and mines you can explore.
So, my first and second main ones were both Petzl Tikkas, just the ordinary base model. Andy (whoops!) had the Tikka 2, obviously, but the plain Tikka was good enough for me. Still is. Looking at the Petzl website, the Tikka has changed almost beyond recognition since I got my last one but I’m not in the market for a new one just yet. My first one (left) is on its second strap. It’s not quite Trigger’s Broom but it’s not too bad. My second one has two lighting modes and it glows for several minutes after you turn it off so you can see where you dumped it.
My spare is the e+Lite, which seems to have had some minor cosmetic changes, most markedly in that my switch is red and it now seems to be white. It has various lighting settings (brightness, flashing etc) plus a red light and a locked setting on the switch. Whereas my Tikkas take AAA batteries, this takes a little button battery and while being ultra-lightweight is great for keeping it around in case of emergency, it also makes it stupidly easy to lose – and I decided years ago that I didn’t need the little storage box.
I’ve also heard good things about Black Diamond headlights but I’ll look into them when my new Tikka dies and I start hunting down a replacement.