MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

134 words :: Feet Banks Regardless of how many carrots our mothers talked us into eating as children, humans cannot see in the dark. And in the Coast Mountains, where towering forests, steep ridges or storm clouds can often obscure the moon, a good headlamp can mean the difference between making it or breaking it. For this reason, few technological innovations of the past 25 years have benefitted outdoor adventurers as much as the Light Emitting Diode, aka: the LED. British and Russian scientists were messing around with diodes (essentially a two-terminal component that conducts electricity primarily in one direction) since the early 1990s, but it wasn’t until 1961 when American researchers Gary Pittman and Bob Baird discovered a diode that emitted infrared light every time it was connected to a current. A year later the duo developed one that could emit light on the visible spectrum (it was red) before eventually “discovering” diodes that could produce all the colours. Over the next decades, manufacturing costs fell (a single diode used to cost upwards of $200) and the first consumer LEDs began hitting shelves in 1994. It was a huge moment for anyone who went outside after dark. Previously, outdoor enthusiasts were at the mercy of old-school headlamps with weak incandescent bulbs and heavy, expensive, single-use, hard to find, four-in-one battery packs. Lights of the era also had penchant for twisting themselves into the “on” position while stowed in a backpack. LED headlamps offered smaller, lighter, brighter and longer-lasting options—it was headlamp perfection! Or was it? Twenty-five year old Dylan Bucher doesn’t remember the incandescent headlamps of the past, but he says today’s LED versions leave plenty of room for improvement. “I grew up with those three-battery, LED headlamps that give you about 300 lumens,” says Bucher, who spent his childhood exploring the BC wilderness with his family and also did a stint ski bumming in Whistler. “But like anyone who has done a lot of outdoor stuff, I lost those headlamps, I broke them, and I cycled through hundreds of batteries. I didn’t feel I was getting the value out of them.” So, he started a company and had one built to his own specifications— Lynx Off Grid Technology. For his first product, Bucher is sourcing the best headlamp components possible, starting with a high-powered, usb- rechargeable 3500mAh lithium-ion battery with one of the best capacity-to- weight ratios on the market. “The whole unit is designed around that cell,” says Bucher. “I read that 70 per cent of the toxic waste in our landfills is e-waste and I wanted to eliminate the need to buy, use and dispose of batteries. The energy used over the lifetime of this lithium battery is the equivalent to using and throwing out 3,500 AAA batteries. “ For the body of the headlamp, Bucher chose aluminum, a much more Thomas Edison developed the original headlamp in 1914 for coal miners in the US. GEAR LED: LET THERE BE LIGHT! Less waste, more lumens ― a BC company looks to improve a game-changer Let there be light, and let there be pow. Malou Peterson has lots of both. ANDREW STRAIN