I Had Six Flashlights In That Drawer. Now I Carry One.

A white one for walking. A red one for not spooking anything. A little UV one I bought and forgot about. All of them dead. Turns out one light does all three jobs — and holds a charge.

By Tom Bradley

Lifelong hunter & small-property outdoorsman · Updated July 2026

Open the junk drawer in my mudroom and you'd have found six flashlights. I counted. A big aluminum one from the farm store. Two cheap plastic ones from a two-pack. A red-lens one I bought for walking out to the stand. A little UV penlight my son-in-law gave me. And a headlamp with a cracked strap.

Here's the thing. Not one of them worked when I needed it. Dead batteries, every time. I'd be standing in the dark at five in the morning clicking through the whole drawer like a fool.

And even the ones that lit up only did one job. The big white one blinded me the second I turned it on and lit up the whole county. The red one was so dim I couldn't see my own boots. The UV thing I never once found a use for.

The problem isn't your flashlight. It's that you need four of them.

Think about what you actually do after dark on your own place.

You walk out to the stand before light — you want dim red so you don't wreck your night vision or announce yourself to everything in the woods. You come back to the truck and need to see the tailgate — that's white flood. Something's moving out at the fence line and you want to know what — that's a tight beam thrown far. You're under the hood at nine at night — you need both hands and a light that stays put.

Four different jobs. And most guys solve it the way I did: buy four different lights, keep them all in a drawer, and have none of them charged.

What made me finally throw the drawer out

A buddy handed me his. One body. Push the button and it cycles through four different lights — and I don't mean brightness levels. I mean four actually different lights, for four actually different jobs.

The red light is the one that changed how I walk in

This is the part I'd tell any hunter over fifty first.

White light does two bad things at once. It wrecks your night vision — your eyes need twenty, thirty minutes to come back — and it announces you from a quarter mile out. Every deer, every coyote, every set of eyes in that treeline knows a man with a flashlight is walking in.

The red panel on this thing sits on the side of the body, so it pools light down at your boots instead of throwing it out ahead. Enough to see roots and rocks. Not enough to blow your eyes out or paint a target on your back. I walk in on red now, every time, and by the time I'm sitting I can already see the field.

The zoom is not a gimmick either

The head pulls out and slides back in. Pushed in, you get a wide wall of light — good for the yard, the barn door, the whole campsite. Pulled out, it tightens into a beam that'll reach the far end of a pasture.

That's the difference between "I see something out there" and "that's a raccoon on the feed bin, not somebody's truck."

The UV I was wrong about

I'll admit I rolled my eyes at this one. But it earns its spot in ways I didn't expect — checking gear and boots for stains and spots you can't see under white light, spotting scorpions if you're out west, finding leaks and marks around the shop, checking whether the dog got to the rug.

I'll be straight with you though: UV is a useful extra, not a magic wand. Don't buy it for the UV alone. Buy it for the other three and enjoy the fourth.

The part that actually solved my drawer problem

It charges with the same USB-C cable as my phone. Four little blue dots on the side tell you what's left, so there's no guessing. And it came in a hard case with the battery, the cable, and a spare adapter tube already in it — which means it lives in one place instead of rattling loose in a drawer with five dead friends.

The tail cap is magnetic, too. That sounds like a small thing until the first time you stick it under a raised hood or on the side of the truck bed and work with both hands.

Straight talk before you buy

A few honest notes, because I'd want somebody to tell me.

It's a real handful — this isn't a pocket penlight, it's a full-size aluminum body with some weight to it. If you want something that disappears in a shirt pocket, this isn't it. The UV is a bonus feature, not a professional inspection tool. And like anything with a rechargeable battery, top it off every few weeks if it's sitting; nothing on earth fixes a light you never charge.

That's the list. Everything else about it has been better than the six it replaced.