reddogg blogg

Invented in 1976 by Wilbert Gore, Gore-Tex is a unique fabric that does an excellent job of repelling water and wind yet remaining relatively breathable. Aside from the science behind the fabric, it should also be noted that the patent of this material represents one of the very few times in recent history when an individual wholly owned the rights to thier invention. The modern Gore-Tex brand has refined it’s products some but should be aplauded for it’s marketing mastery. Clothing that incorperates this material wears the name like audio equipment wears the brand THX, or computers wear the badge of Intel.

This motivates many companies to try and engineer a knock-off fabric like Marmot Precip. Not that Precip is a bad product. I purchased a Marmot Precip shell and it was well made with taped seams and pit zips. However for the same price of $99 the Lands; End Gore-Tex jacket I also own is far superior. This was dissapointing because I bought the Marmot to replace the Lands.

With the science fact reinforced with personal experience I have hit the streets (online) in search of a replacement. Fortunately the afformentioned useful Gore-Tex website has a great product finder that can help you locate products. I was looking at a shell from The North Face with features like the option for a zip-in liner. However the lack of pit-zips, which I have found very useful even in casual situations, kept me looking. Not to mention after some looking there is a general opinion online that TNF quality has fallen off since they were acquired by Vanity Fair in about 1999; certainly the omission of pit-zips correlates with this. Other products using XCR triple layer is the Arc’Teryx line.

The Arc website is very pretty and flashy, but is nearly entirely devoid of useful information. I had basic questions about the product lines and how they compared with each other, one needs a decoder ring to dicern the acronym and name combinations. However luckily backcountry.com has a really nice feature where a representative is available for online chat. Rich shared a wealth of information on the Arc’Teryx line: SV means Severe, AR means All Around, LT is Light and SL is Superlight; and in the same order, thier Alpha, Beta, Theta models are each lighter than the one before (Alpha is top dog here). I was also told thier Sidewinder line falls somewhere near the heavier Alpha build.

Without a doubt I am very close to overpurchasing for a daily use jacket. However my travel experience with the Marmot Precip spurred the search for a better solution. I will follow up here when I make that move. Maybe I can score a good deal.

There is probably more hot air expanded in the outdoor press on the subject of waterproofs than just about any other subject. Without going into all the contradictory figures that every manufacturer produces to prove their waterproofs are the best, we can safely state that you will get wet when wearing waterproofs, but not, in certain circumstances, as wet as you would get without them! Apart from rain trickling in the hood and sleeves, the major source of moisture is your own sweat. The ability to disperse this sweat is known as “breathability”. We certainly cannot tell you what the “best” waterproofs are. This is because that depends on what you want them for, and also we only stock a few, and only a few of those have good enough stock availability to sell on-line. What we can say is that the small selection detailed here are all reckoned to be leaders in their field.