Corn Maze at Night, Mind Blown

LittleBill

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Jan 21, 2009
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Not sure if in the right place but led flashlights were used.





SO my girlfriend puts up with my small flashlight hobby. slightly before Halloween, she shows me an ad for a corn maze at night, says bring a flashlight and do the maze at night. i think awesome!.



so after reading on here the past couple years, i realize i may not want to go into this with my tk40 on turbo.... and since Halloween i figure lets make it slightly scary



i scrounged up 2 of the crappiest lights i have ever seen, pictures can be added if needed. put in half dead cells and figured might make it 20 minutes before they crap out. i also took a half dead maglight. which sadly was considerably brighter.



the lights are so crappy, the free keychain lights that lighthound gives free, or the 10 pack from DX were MILES above these lights.



i also take my ld20 r4 and tk40 as backup in case the lights fail.



we get to the corn maze, realize its larger then expected about 5 acres and although there is some lighting a good 3/4 is in deep darkness.



i hand my g/f her light she turns it on , looks at it, looks at me and says are you kidding me. (got to say it made me smile. shes become use to my fenix lights). i tell her lets make it scary and just go with it. she does and off we go. 3 minutes in she tells me she wants a fenix i tell her no and we continue. she goes on to tell me these are the crappiest lights she has ever seen. makes me proud i did a good job getting junk.



i am also curious to see what other people brought, this is really the only function i have been to where flashlights are expected.



Unbelievably within 20 minutes i have come to ridiculous conclusion that my crap flashlights are on par if not better then 90% of the lights there :ohgeez:. The maglight which we are not using would have been considered a high quality light.



there are people with mini mags, batteries fried. i mean turning it off would have done nothing. then i found a group with glow sticks, yea 1 foot radius doesn't really help in 5 acres of mazes with no moon. then the best was at least 3 groups with 0 flashlights..........:eek::eek::eek::eek: how is that even fun? i mean parts were barely lit and you need to read clues in the maze.



i was shocked mind blown, credulous that anyone would go in the maze let alone at night without a flashlight, and i don't mean kids, some were 30+ without a flashlight



we eventually went to the ld20 and tk40 both on medium, which compared to everyone else were considered ridiculously bright. i tried turbo but it felt way too much like cheating.



figured you guys would get a kick out of the story....



any similar stories of places where your told to bring a flashlight then don't?
 

f22shift

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sounds fun to brave it with old technology. and a nice little lesson in there.

i usually go out walking at night with the wife. one time it was after some rain. which means worms all over the walkway. she's freaking out and it's poorly lit in the park. i make her literally beg for a light to teach her a lesson. now, she asks for one every time. she's a bit spoiled now too with any light under 500lumens gets a 'that's it?' response.
 

justanotherguy

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My neighbors have learned to put up with my new hobby, but a couple months so in the ,I took my VP1000 to a driveway party.I left it on a table just to see who would discover it first.the reactions were awesome! People were WTF is THAT?????? They couldn't believe a flashlight could light up houses 3-400 feet away.
I do love the stealth near-stock look of it!!!!!!!!
 

jamesmtl514

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cool story. It goes to show that very few people have foresight and arrive prepared.
It would have been ideal if the management of this corn maze would have rental lights, for those same people.

Stupid should hurt.
 

passive101

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Most people are completely unprepared for just about everything. One of the biggest obstacles is low light and darkness for humans. Technology helps with that and almost no one carries even a bad light. I'm actually waiting for my new quark to get here and my friends and I are going to a couple night corn mazes as well. I can't wait it should be a blast.
 

IcantC

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It's always best when you have a multilevel light on low and then crank it up to turbo. People are like WTF? Your batteries were dead, how'd it get so bright?
 

selas

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Maybe the others were just trying to preserve their night vision :grin2:
 

JohnnyLunar

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I actually was watching Mythbusters on TV last night, and they were testing the myth of walking in a straight line if you are blind folded. It was confirmed that no one can walk/swim/drive in a straight line for more than a very short distance while blind. Pitch black night would be the same scenario. So a corn maze is bad enough without a flashlight, imagine being lost in the wilderness at night with no moon and no flashlight, trying to travel in a straight line.

Being a flashaholic, I'm hardly ever without a good quality flashlight in my pocket. Even if I don't have a primary light with me, I carry a Fenix E05 on my keychain at all times. I suspect the floody 27-lumen E05 would have seemed like a 500-lumen light compared to what you describe others having in the corn maze. In fact, I think a light like the E05 is perfect for that scenario, where all your lighting needs are within about 5-10 feet, and a bright hotspot could hinder your vision when shined against an object or a group of corn stalks a few feet from your face.

People that venture out in the night without even a decent keychain light bewilder me.
 

Chidwack

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That's a great story. It is amazing how unprepared people are and the stupid things these unprepared idiots will do. It reminds me of one of my favorite stories.

This is a story about anti hunters who tried to ruin the hunt of a man who was hunting deer. It took place it a heavily wooded area in the mid west. As the hunter got out of his car a group of anti hunters got out of their cars and started to harass him. It was an evening hunt. They followed him into the woods until he got to a spot where he set up his tree stand. The anti hunters informed him that they were staying right there with him and would surely scare off any deer that might come along. The hunter climbed into the tree anyway and sat there for a few hours before climbing out of the tree before dark and walking back to his car. The anti hunters were overjoyed that they had ruined his evening hunt and told him that they would be there to ruin his hunt whenever he tried hunting there again. He informed them that he was coming back in the morning but he was coming back before daylight. The anti hunters informed him that they would be there in the morning before sun up and dared him to try hunting there again. The told them he would be there one hour before daybreak. The next morning when he showed up in the dark, there waited the group of anti hunters. They were so proud of their success the day before that they even brought along some extra people.
The hunter put on his backpack and started into the woods with his flashlight and the whole team of anti hunters following him along. He wondered around until daylight and then wondered around some more until he found a place to put up his tree stand. He told them that he would be there all day to which they replied that it didn't matter and they were staying as long as it took and that they had brought their lunches with them. They played around under his tree stand all day until it started to get dark. The hunter climbed out of the tree stand and pulled a sleeping bag out of his backpack. The anti hunters asked him what he was doing and he told them that he was staying right there all night. None of the anti hunters had brought lights, extra food, warm clothing and were unprepared to spend a night in the woods. They were all completely lost after following the hunter deep into the woods. They begged him to let them have his flashlight so they could try to find their way out of the woods. They asked him if he was going to start a fire to which he replied NO!. Did he have any extra food for them? NO! They ended up spending the worst night of their lives out in the woods trying to keep warm. Too bad it didn't rain all night.
 

varmint

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About a year ago we had a "haunted house" close by for Halloween, it was done up very good for a fund raiser. Some one took a flashlight, well 2 did. He kept shining it in peoples eyes and laughing, it was a 3cell maglite I think. I shined my olight M20 in his, that stopped all of it, the look on his face was of total shock! He did ask what kind of a light is that. I replied a bright one.
 

Richub

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I could imagine Chidwack's story as a screenplay for a short movie about why you should prepare yourself when going far into remote areas.

I really enjoyed that story, and those anti-hunters had a nice lesson learned. ;)

Too bad there aren't any corn mazes I know of here in the Netherlands...
 

DanTSX

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How many knuckleheads were confident that their cellphone backlight was their "flashlight"?
 

mmace1

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any similar stories of places where your told to bring a flashlight then don't?

Yeah - corn maze! Better without lights - or with the resolve to use only the lowest setting(s). Above 40 lumens...screw that, you're ruining the fun. Ideally - have a light, but don't use it at all. *Maybe* for reading the hint-signs (if the corn maze has such things and they're hard to see).

Really...it's like wearing the perfectly-floody-neutral-tint headlamp through a haunted house - screw that, it's not the point! Dark can be a lot of fun. If I didn't think that, I probably wouldn't even have ever gotten into flashlights...as power outages are infrequent here, and really - no need to venture into non-light-bulb territory if I don't want to.
 

fyrstormer

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Considering the number of people who look at me with incredulity when I tell them I carry a flashlight with me every day, it's not at all surprising that lots of people would show up to a "fun event" without any flashlights. Despite the fact that it's dark 12 hours a day on average, somehow people consider flashlights to be something only carried by "experts" or "professionals." It's probably at least partly because pocketable lighting was such either minimally effective or impossible for most of human history.

Actually, what would've been really fun would've been to bring a portable oil lamp -- making sure not to drop it on the dry, flammable corn husks, of course. ;)
 

LittleBill

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to the guys saying they would have done it without lights.

i don't think you understand how dark or how large these mazes are.

in the dark sections of the maze. you can't see your hand in front of your face. no matter how long you let your eyes adjust. you are effectively blind. not to mention we did not finish the maze in time. we were in for 3 1/2hours. the record for this maze was 2 hours 10 minutes.


believe me pitch darkness on 5 acres in a maze is not fun


i will be attempting their new maze this year and will be bringing my lights once again
 

Cataract

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Every time I go hiking I come across people wearing street shoes, cotton, no equipment, 500mL of water in a clear bottle under the sun and no food or snack on a trail that takes 3 to 6 hours -sometimes more, I've seen them trying for mount Washington! I also see them leaving the base of the mountain when I'm just back from the trail, no more than an hour ahead of sunset and they're going up there with nothing in their hands and I'm sure none of them ever thought a flashlight would be a good thing to bring. I'm actually VERY surprised that there are not more deaths in the mountains.
 
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