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as good 01' fashioned paper. Paper is also less likely to have a technical glitch and requires less electricity. If the need arises, paper is also significantly easier to swallow. Gels and filters. Coloured gels, and the more permanent coloured filters, are designed to colour and shade one's flashlight beam so as to make it less detectable from a distance, or less damaging to one's night vision. Some companies have also begun selling flashlights powered by red, green or blue LEDs rather than the brighter white LEDs. These coloured lights look cool and are extremely popular among explorers who fancy themselves secret agents or paramilitaries, or who like buying things, but I've yet to be convinced that there is any real need for them - shining your flashlight beam through your fingers or through a piece of cloth usually does the trick. (I freely admit that I love my red, green and blue LED flashlights - I just won't admit that they're necessary.) G PS units. Handheld units that use orbiting satellites to pinpoint your location on the globe using the Global Positioning System (GPS) are ridiculously cool, and can be a lot of fun when used for geocaching. Some explorers, eager to convince themselves that their GPS receiver is useful for something other than geocaching, manage to convince themselves that knowing the precise coordinates of entrances and other key locations will make life easier for themselves and future explorers. That may be, but waiting for a GPS unit to find the requisite satellite signals can be tedious, and "look for a manhole in the middle of the field" should be directions enough for any explorer. Night vision equipment. Whether it be scopes or goggles, night vision equipment is perhaps the ultimate example of something you'd bring along because it's cool, rather than because it's useful. I have a scope myself, and while it is definitely cool, I acknowledge that it would take some pretty creative thinking for me to come up with a scenario in which it was actually useful enough to justify bringing it along - it would be much easier to think of a situation where, say, an elastic band or a handheld mirror would be handy. Night vision equipment has also been demonstrated to be unusually suspicious when found by the powers that be (thank you, Landmark Six). Unless you're just fooling around, leave it at home. Radios. Radios, whether two-way walkie-talkies, radios employing the 14-channel Family Radio Service (FRS) or units on the more powerful General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) are totally fun. They can