America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza While sleeping bags have temperature ratings, with down jackets and other insulated jackets, there exists no easy way to determine how warm any specific garment will be. But despite the absence of a precise metric for gauging the warmth of down and synthetic puffy jackets, there are ways to assess a specific jacket’s relative warmth before you …
By Michael Lanza So you’re planning to thru-hike the John Muir Trail and making all of the necessary preparations, and now you’re wondering: What’s the best gear for a JMT hike? Having thru-hiked the JMT as well as taken numerous other backpacking trips all over the High Sierra—mostly between late August and late September, which I consider that the best …
Ultralight Down Jacket Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer/2 Down Hoody $325, 8.8 (men’s medium) Sizes: men’s S-XXL, women’s XS-XL backcountry.com There’s no getting around a hard truth about most of the products we buy to use outdoors: Their materials come from the petroleum products that are a primary driver of climate change. Increasingly, outdoor brands and consumers are leaning in on …
Read onReview: Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer 2 Down Hoody
Breathable Insulated Jacket Outdoor Research Refuge Air Hooded Jacket $229, 15 oz. (men’s medium) Sizes: men’s S-XXL, women’s XS-XL backcountry.com On a ski tour in blowing snow in Idaho’s Boise Mountains, I wore this breathable, insulated jacket climbing uphill for the first hour without overheating. Then, while ski touring along a windy ridge with up-and-down terrain, I stayed warm without …
Down Jacket Feathered Friends Helios Hooded Jacket $389, 1 lb. 1 oz. (men’s medium) Sizes: men’s XS-XXL featheredfriends.com As I stood outside our yurt on a December evening in the backcountry of Idaho’s Boise Mountains, enjoying an inky-black sky riddled with stars as the temperature plunged into the single digits Fahrenheit, this fat down jacket felt like an impenetrable force …