One of the action photos from a rain gear test I recently saw was a guy walking on a trail wide enough to support ATV if not truck traffic. That’s fine if you’re talking about weight, noise or breathability, but everyone who hunts knows that it’s the unimproved trail and brush that reveal the true value of gear.
All new rain jackets can withstand 10 minutes in the shower in your master bedroom. The waterproof coating is fresh, the fabric is new and there will likely be no problem. That’s a test for people looking for rain jackets that will keep them dry from the car to the automatic door at the grocery store.
Even if the test includes some brush, that’s different than an hour of beating brush and wading through berry bushes and is much different than squeezing through alders or crawling under dead spruce. We want to know about longevity because that is what durability is, so a stroll up a path doesn’t tell us much.
In the same way that there should be no college football rankings until week 5, there should be no rain gear ratings until day 20. At that point the weak points have been exposed and the frauds found out. A minimum of 20 days allows one to ask questions like, How has backpack friction impacted the coating on the shoulders? Has repeated brush comprised the fabric? Once the coating has been completely saturated, does it lose its waterproof abilities? This also ensures that the gear has been on more than one hunt.
That’s the problem with many testing parameters. People take the gear on a hunt or simulation rather than hunt with it for a season. As consumers we should realize that gear reviews are little more than first impressions and outdoor companies should realize that they are charging a car payment for articles of clothing that depreciate rapidly.
Sure, no gear is perfect or meant to last forever, but if I’m paying $329 for the jacket and $270 for the pants, they better last a year.
A breathable jacket will get you through afternoon thunderstorms. But not four days of continuous rain on a hunt in which you can’t dry out the jacket in the hot tent at night. Hunters who don’t simply sit and wait out the rain, have moisture forced through fabrics while hiking through brush. That’s why I went with the light commercial fishing grade gear from Grundens on a recent moose hunt when the weather forecast looked wet. I really like my Stone Glacier M7 pants which have survived two seasons of caribou, blacktail deer and mountain goat, but I didn’t want to risk a problem and I am assume the small problems spots caused by wear and tear will likely become more serious entering this third season, or their 40th or so day in the field.
While we are moving from the influencer model of advertising in which some dude says this tent “is his favorite” likely because it was free and there was no inclement weather when he was filming the obligatory sponsor shot on his week-long trip to the wilderness, it still very much exists. The hunting public has become more suspicious of influencers who have never met a sponsorship deal they didn’t like, but it is still difficult to flesh out the quality of the review and the product.
I’d say that if you want to name your product after a region, it has to be able to live there and not be worn on a trip there. You can’t name your jacket the Tongass if it can’t hold up to a season. (This is probably why no company has had the guts to name any product after the rainiest region in the United States.) No one is going to name their hunting pant the Ketchikan, probably because Ketchikan gets 140 inches of rain per year and features some of the most brutal brush you can imagine with thick Devils Club poking at the material and alpine cedars and spruce pawing at pants and jackets.
I had a signature pair of hunting pants from an up-and-coming (at the time) company that didn’t last 1 hunt in the alpine. An alpine cedar, ubiquitous in the subalpine here, grabbed and tore a 3-inch gash in the lower leg. Naturally, someone online had declared the pants “bombproof” in their 5-star review.
Yes, I suppose they were, as long as they never came in contact with anything.
POSTSCRIPT:
A reader send me a link to the Black Ovis Tongass rain jacket.
The reviews are telling.
I will say that the Custom Arrow Builder on the website and I have used it twice. Quality and efficient operation they have there.
This, and firearms reviews that consider a box of ammo or a range trip enough testing to rate it. Sure the scope works well on a flat range in June but will it function after I tumble while stalking in sub freezing weather? I worked with a company that got into a long running argument on the RS forum about their scopes being able to survive a drop.
Hear! Hear! I do a few reviews. The last three I published were from fishing an entire season with boots, reels and rod. This influencer paid/shot/post stuff needs to be laughed out of the room.