While hiking and exploring at night, I typically have a headlamp, a handheld light like the FW3A, D4vn, E07vn or D4Svn and a compact thrower like the CatV6vn, GT MINI, T27 or similar, which I belt or pack carry in the water bottle pouch of my backpack. The K30GTvn has pretty much replaced all of the compact, throwers lately. The other lights mentioned work well for pointing and identifying things like animals, signs, structures while the K30GTvn also does that but because of the greater output and larger hotspot, is great for searching and scanning large sections of hillside and canyons.
K30GTvn about 175 yards to beam center. The larger Saguaro cactus out there are 25-35 feet tall.
The run times have been surprisingly great on VTC5D's and I get a lot of cumulative time running at turbo, 30-60 seconds at a time. Even though it was about 45°F it seemed like we kept the light pretty toasty during the last 2-3 miles of the hike as my buddy and I passed it back at forth, scanning the terrain for wildlife. After crossing a creek, we thought we heard a bear so as we got higher up the opposite ridge I ran the light on turbo for several minutes trying to find some eye-shine down along the water, through the thick brush and cottonwood trees. I never got to see the bear but the stainless power button and tripod connection were finger burning hot. After what seemed like a better than average workout for the light, it still had 3.49V on two of the cells and 3.50V on the third. It was the icing on the cake after getting some really good use out of the light tonight.
