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Posted by Bill S on July 10, 2007 at 3:17:52 pm EDT
In reply to Hiking emergencies posted by kutenay on July 9, 2007 at 8:44:32 am EDT

One thing to add about carrying a light - carry a spare set of batteries, even if you are "absolutely certain" the lamp has fresh batteries. I have had two incidents where the "fresh" batteries failed. In neither case was it my headlamp, but my partner's. One was after a long day of climbing the Exum Direct on the Grand. We had started the climb before dawn, as is standard to avoid the afternoon thunderstorms, so had a couple hours on the batteries. This turned out to be good because in addition my partner was very slow (he had been still recovering from giardiasis he had gotten in the Winds just a few weeks before). My partner decided when we got back to the camp at the col that he *had* to get back to Jackson that night. By the time we got down through the boulder field, it was dark and we were into the thick woods (but on a good trail). His batteries died within a half hour, so we hiked the last several miles to the car on just my headlamp.

The other was a backcountry ski tour in the Tatoosh in Rainier NP. A blizzard developed while we were out (expected) that slowed us more than we had expected, due to the deep powder (great on the earlier downhill runs, really slow when in the forest after dark and unable to see our earlier tracks. My headlamp was getting pretty low by the time we got back to the road, and one of my partner's had exhausted his batteries. My other partner's lamp still had plenty of battery. The cold, of course, had lowered the batteries' voltages and shortened their lifetimes (if you didn't know the low temperature effect on batteries, you now know that temperatures below freezing drastically shorten the life of alkalines, and significantly shorten the life even of the lithium AAs).

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