How the LHKNL Headlamp Changed My Weekend Trips

A headlamp is the kind of thing you do not think about until it lets you down at the worst possible moment. For years I kept a cheap battery model in the door pocket of my truck, and for years it worked well enough for the short walk from the cab to the camp and back. Then it quit. On an October elk hunt up the Monte Cristo range, I needed light to finish the job before daylight, and the lamp flickered halfway through. That is a long, cold walk back to the truck, and a good way to take a fall.

The LHKNL headlamp showed up a few weeks later. My wife ordered it after one complaint too many, and it sat on the kitchen counter for a day before I threw it in the truck. That was last fall. Since then it has ridden in the bed of my 2016 Tundra through rifle season, a wet winter, and more ice fishing trips to Pineview than I can count. For a piece of gear to survive in that truck bed is not a small thing.

I will be honest with you. I did not expect much from a headlamp I had never heard of. The cheap ones I had tried before either ran through batteries or ended up in a drawer. What changed my mind was not the first use, or even the first week. It was the way the light kept working when everything around it was soaked and cold.

The night that settled it was late November, after a storm crossed the Ogden Valley. A friend got his truck into a drifted ditch, and I spent the better part of an hour with a chain and a shovel. It was dark, it was snowing sideways, and the wind cut through my coat. My old headlamp would have gone dim on me. The LHKNL headlamp held a steady, wide beam the whole time, and it still had plenty of charge when I climbed back into the cab.

That was the night I stopped treating it as my wife's thoughtful purchase and started treating it as mine. It has been on every trip since, and I have not once reached for a spare battery.

I do not carry a backup headlamp anymore. I used to, because I did not trust the one I had. Now the only lamp I reach for is the LHKNL headlamp.

You find out what a headlamp is made of when you are standing in a snowy ditch at midnight with a shovel in your hand. This one never flinched.

The more I used it, the more I noticed the little things. It charges with a cord, so I stopped keeping a pack of spare batteries in the console. The beam spreads wide enough to set up camp without that tunnel-vision feeling, but it reaches far enough to walk a trail before first light. On nights cold enough to make my fingers clumsy, the button is still easy to find without looking.

I used it all through winter. By March I was taking it on trout trips on the Weber River even though I did not usually need a light by then. A headlamp earns its place in your pack when it is already there for the one time you do need it.

The real test came in April, on an overnight trip in the camper shell. I got up a few hours before daylight to make coffee, and the lamp lit the camp well enough that I did not stumble over anything. Ruby slept through the whole thing, which is the surest sign of a calm, steady light. It is the small things that make a weekend trip feel easy.

Come summer, the lamp went with me to Willard Bay for the early bass bite. It lives in a small dry bag in the center console, and I plug it in when I get home from a trip. I give it more care than I give most of my gear, and that probably says more than anything I could tell you.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If we were sitting at my kitchen table with coffee, here is what I would say. You do not need the fanciest headlamp on the shelf, and you do not need another cheap one that quits in the cold. You need one that turns on every time, holds a charge, and takes up as little space as it can. The LHKNL headlamp has done that for me through a full cycle of seasons, and I am not easy on gear. It will not start a fire or cook your dinner, and it will not be the thing you bring up at deer camp. But it will be the thing you stop thinking about, and that is the highest compliment I can give anything that rides in my truck. If the headlamp you have now makes you wonder whether it will work when you need it, that alone is reason enough to look at this one.