[Randito]

[Brian Curtis]

[Riverside Laker]

Darkest hike: Snoqualmie Pass railroad tunnel when we turned off lights in the middle.

[James Wells]

I have done several 8-day caving trips. It's pretty dark in there, especially when turning all the lights out to sleep. I sometimes see imaginary sparkles in the complete darkness especially when waking up from sleep. Unfortunately Photobucket has clobbered the pictures in this post, I need to re-upload them some time. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2012/11/21/1163851/-Time-in-a-Timeless-Place

[Kellbell]

[GaliWalker]

On a touristy tour of the Laurel Caverns in southwestern Pennsylvania, they had a section where they turned off the lights for a minute or so, and that was an experience! Your eyes strained and strained to see anything, but without success. Total dark...I've never experienced anything like it.

When the lights weren't off, phew!

On a hike, I've never had the batteries on my headlamp die, but I remember one occasion hiking up to Foss Lakes (I think...or it could have been the Necklace Valley?) in the early morning hours where I had to cross a stream, but my headlamp wasn't strong enough to see the far side and pick up the trail. I had to stay put and wait for sunrise. Pretty tame stuff, compared to the situation above.

[oldwild]

The only night hike I went on on purpose was as night hike to glacier basin on Mt Rainier when I was in Boy Scouts in the 60's. We all had our trusty two D cell flashlights when we left. I don't know of any lights going out, but I remember the issue of trying to figure out how to pitch our tents in the dark. Other than that, I've never really been caught in the dark. One interesting happening. A friend and I were camping and I went out in the dark to pee and thought I saw a light in the distance. I asked my friend to check and we didn't see anything. We settled back to our evening stuff when we heard "HEY EARL". We went out with lights and guided them to the camp. They had started late and didn't know we were up there except they recognized my truck at the trailhead. Other than feet wet in the swamp for them we had a fun time.

[yorknl]

In 2020 I hiked up the Icicle Creek trail and set up camp just across the bridge at about the five-mile point - which today would be the other bridge on that trail that's collapsed, in addition to the one over French Creek. A very smoky day turned into a four-hour deluge, accompanied by lightning and thunder, that began around dinnertime and let up a bit after 10 p.m. Not only did my enthusiasm for the weekend wane, I got a little wigged out over what had previously been a very dry forest taking four hours of lightning. So I waited an hour or so to see if the rain had really let up, threw everything in my pack, and spend the next couple hours hiking out. Got back to the trailhead around 2 a.m. or so. I couldn't recall how fresh my flashlight batteries were but was 95% positive they were still fairly fresh. I set it on low and only turned it up in a few spots where the trail zigged a bit; no problem there. For the first hour or so it was still cloudy and for fun I'd flip the light off now and then to take in a fairly thick forest at night under cloud cover; it was, indeed, dark. Very dark. Eventually though the clouds blew out - first time I'd seen smoke-free skies in quite a while - and with clear stars the flashlight might almost have been optional were it not for th tree cover. It was a memorable hike, with the sound of water dripping off the greenery, the starlight, and the creek murmuring in the background. And yes, it didn't take long to figure out that the lightning wasn't a huge concern - a lot of water had been spread across those lands. Honorable mention to the ranger-guided, off-the-normal-paved-paths trip to Lower Cave underneath Carlsbad Cavern's Big Room. The protocol when last I did that six or seven years ago was to do a blackout in one of the smaller chambers, well-removed from any light sources in the main cave, and it is indeed black. Very, very black.

[runup]