When you are out camping, mountaineering or climbing in the snow or even just hiking down a trail, one of your most important pieces of gear is your outer layer of protection. Yet beginners are often confounded by the huge number of choices out there.
How does the Patagonia Rain Shadow Jacket compare?
A good jacket can make the difference between an enjoyable day out in the wild and a miserable, wet ordeal. Even more important is the fact that sometimes the right jacket can mean the difference between surviving and getting hypothermia, frost bite or even freezing to death. The Patagonia Rain Shadow is a great jacket that provides a good blend of protection, light weight, durability and cost. Now no jacket is ever going to score top marks on all of those criteria. If you want a high quality and durable jacket you will often end up having to pay a lot for it or make sacrifices in terms of how much it weighs and how bulky it is. So once you accept that there are inevitable trade-offs involved, then this particular piece of outerwear fits into a pretty neat sweet spot for most outdoor sports participants.
It also has to be able to interact well with your Polartec or merino wool base layers, keeping you warm but not causing you to overheat.
The first thing to note about this jacket is that it has a breathable waterproof outer. This means that it lets some of your sweat out the jacket to prevent you from drowning in your own perspiration. But it also keeps the rain out. Whole books have been written about which sort of waterproof breathable material is best. Among the best know are those produced by Gore and trading under variations of the name Gore tex. These are quality fabrics from a top manufacturer. Yet they are also quite expensive so many good outdoor clothing manufacturers have produced their own. Patagonia uses H2N0 in this jacket and the odds are that the average user won’t notice the difference between this and one of the more expensive brand-named fabrics. The jacket also has most of the features that you would expect from a top-name mountaineering shell such as a decent hood, pockets that are lined with soft fleece to keep your hands warm and enough zips to let you vent excess heat and moisture when you are exercising hard. The breathability of a jacket is one of the most important features of a good jacket. When you are ascending a mounting and pumping out energy and sweat, no breathable jacket will be able to get rid of all of the perspiration, so you need to be able to open little zips and create vents under your arms and over your chest to move the heat away from you. Overheating and then stopping exercising suddenly is a real danger as it can bring on hypothermia quite quickly unless you are careful.
All in all, the Patagonia Rain Shadow is a quality jacket that will serve most people well. So the next time you are looking for waterproof clothing or just a breathable jacket, be sure and check out this one.
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