Mountain Biking - night riding

I have a night ride planned shortly, and have a problem with lights. We have a rechargable system that is 5wflood and 10wspot, but this only has a 3 hour life in the battery. A spare battery is planned but this light system is only going to be used when required. To give us ride lights, we have a Cateye EL300 and an EL500. They are supposed to give us 30 hours on the replacable batteries, but are only going to be used as riding lights as they are not strong enough for the more technical parts of the trail. The ride incidentally will be 80 miles, and as we have found out, Night riding is going to be slower so reckon it will take 10 hours of riding. Problem is- I am looking for a Helmet light. Anyone any experience of these? It will only be used for map reading, or if repairs have to be made, so we are not looking at anything too powerful. Only point is, is must not be gold plated, and it must be a helmet light. Anyone any suggestions?

If you really only want it for map reading and repairs, get one of those LED Petzl lamps from REI for $30. I have one of those stashed for a "limp home" light incase my other bulbs and batteries fail (haven't had to use it for that yet, so don't know how well it will serve me).

A Cateye Trail Rat or Headtrip can be had for under $100 and puts 10w of Halogen light wherever you look down the trail. Very handy for looking into turns, allowing you to keep your speed up and keep the momentum of the ride rolling along.

My bar mount is a Halogen dual beam 8/20 watt system. I find the 8 watt bulb just bright enough to see my way through a climb. On flat ground I need something brighter to see in front of myself a reasonable distance, and at speed on a downhill section the full 20+8 watts plus my 10w headlamp is sufficient to roll at a near-daylight pace.

This guy doesn't have an REI near him, or dollars, for that matter. A little LED light would be plenty sufficient for map reading and such. Just make sure you have a lot of batteries. My worst crash ever was due to my lights running low on a night ride. I misjudged the depth of a shadow I was approaching. Instead of it being a little 6" depression it was a two foot trench!

I solved that problem with the LED that's built in my nokia phone.

Cheers,

Ricardo

PS You can also get one of those front lights that can be easily removed from the clamp like serfas 5 led opticube.