Gear Reviews, Adventures, and a Middle-Aged Return to the Mountains
It’s not often a purchase of climbing equipment turns into a Berkshire Hathaway level investment, but if you picked up one of these a few years ago, you were very fortunate.
Let’s delve into what makes this unique piece of climbing gear so rare, and so expensive.
Outdoor gear companies are always innovating and marketers always want to sell things. Sometimes, older discontinued gear simply does the job. These four items discontinued by their makers still deliver after years of use. I’ll tell you why they remain my favorites and why great discontinued gear–used or new–just makes sense in 2024 and beyond.
For an easy insulating layer, it’s hard to beat the Patagonia Nano Puff Hoody.
Patagonia’s Nano Puff Hoody has become my Old Standby, but that’s not the way things started out.
When I resolved to “get back out there” after nearly two decades away from the outdoors, I knew it was time to retire my mid-1990s REI three-in-one Gore-Tex-shelled down coat. My trusty blue coat had carried me through winters in the U.S. mountain west, in China and Russia, and on the U.S. East Coast. But twenty years on, I found that the waterproof shell would leak in heavy rain and the zip-in down liner was showing its age. And that ’90s styling. . . . Continue reading “Patagonia Nano Puff Hoody Long-Term Review”