Trail Tested | Garmin Varia UT800 Smart Headlight

Trail Tested | Garmin Varia UT800 Smart Headlight

Price: $99.95

With the days growing shorter there seems to be less and less time to get out on a bicycle, whether it be for training or fun. It's been well over a year since we've been on a night ride and at least a couple of years since we were riding regularly after the sun went down. That said, our trusty Night Rider bike headlight was nowhere to be found (funny how that happens in a cluttered garage!) and when we spotted the Garmin Varia UT800 Smart Headlight on the shelf at Roy's Cyclery yesterday, we were intrigued by the branding. While Garmin is best known for its cycling computers and watches, we were unaware until yesterday that they even offered a headlight.
Packing 800 lumens with a claimed 90-minute run time on full power, the Garmin light is compact and sleek. It's the mounting system, however, that really intrigued us. The package includes a bar mount that doubles as a computer mount on top, and a light mount on the bottom. Furthermore, the light can be attached to any GoPro mount and mounted anywhere a GoPro can be attached. If you run a Garmin Edge computer already, this mount will make perfect sense, as it doesn't require any extra room on the bars to mount the headlight. On our trail bike, however, we prefer to run a Garmin Fenix watch rather than the bar-mounted computer like we do on our cross-country and road bikes. Nonetheless, the mount is pretty trick and very sturdy. Attaching the light to the bottom of the mount is clunky at best when you first take the parts out of the box, and not intuitive at all. Eventually, we had to resort to reading the directions (imagine that!) and finally got it set up with some adjustment. Once the bracket is dialed in, it is easy to remove the light for charging.

Speaking of charging, we were so excited about our new purchase that we plugged the Garmin light into our cigarette lighter in the truck on our way home and took it for its maiden voyage with only 40 minutes of charge time. And it worked perfectly. 

The light itself has three different power settings, as well as a flashing setting and the "smart" setting, which utilized date from the Garmin Edge computer you can pair it with. In this setting, the light conserves its battery by glowing dimly until the speeds pick up. The faster you go, the brighter the lights get. We didn't find this setting very pleasant when descending a trail on our mountain bike, as full power full time is most ideal. The speeds on a mountain bike, especially at night on a technical trail, are not fast enough to get the light glowing at 800 lumens. It's best just to crank that baby up manually and let 'er rip.

On full power, the Varia UT800 is plenty bright and does a fantastic job of lighting up the trail. The mounting system is clean and secure, and the unit itself is water-resistant and seems to have a great run time. Worth the $99.99? Absolutely. Night riding brings a whole new exciting dimension to mountain biking. We love it!

Garmin.com