Mountain Hardwear Typhoon Jacket
September 30, 2008
As you all know, the Geargals are from Alaska. Therefore we’re used to our rain gear being made of rubber, shaped like it belongs on an episode of Deadliest Catch, and bright orange in color. Mountain Hardwear to the rescue! The Typhoon (which must have been named after the summer of 2008 in Alaska, boy did we have a lot of rain) is my new favorite piece for drizzly and just plain downpour days. Truly, honest-to-pete waterproof, the Typhoon seals out the rain without the dreaded “sack look” that our favorite fishing heroes sport.
The Typhoon does have pit zips, which, as you all know, aren’t my favorite feature, but as we all also know, I am an anomaly. So you all get your precious pit zips and I get to think grumpily “If only this jacket didn’t have pit zips.” Such is life. But speaking of favorite feature, the hood on this jacket has got to be some kind of gift from another dimension. I am not a big fan of hoods because they are usually too big and bulky, and don’t allow much peripheral visibility. I know they’re usually sized to fit over helmets, which is great, but when you’re not wearing a helmet it really sucks to turn your head to look at something and find yourself staring at the inside of your jacket hood. With those hoods, you have to ratchet down all the straps so that the hood fits your head, not a nonexistent helmet. The Typhoon’s hood solves that problem with its automatic shrink-wrap resizing microchip, which alters the shape of the hood to each user’s individual head, allowing the user full head mobility without the hood shifting, bunching, binding, or otherwise restricting motion. OK, OK, the jacket does not have that microchip thingy – but the hood fits so well it may as well have. This little wonder just snugs right around my face and moves with me so that I don’t have to push it out of the way if I want to look around. The hem is about hipbone-length so that the wearer can pull on rain pants without double-bagging her lower torso. That’s a really nice feature when it’s just rainy and not cold out – doubling up on waterproof layers can make things get too steamy under there. And now that we’ve entered the “innuendo section” of the review….
Moving on, the Typhoon is so lightweight that there’s no excuse to not bring it along, and it’s so effective that I see it making itself useful even as the mercury drops up here in the soon-to-be frozen north. I think I’ll be hard-pressed to find a rain jacket that performs and fits as well as this piece. It’s earned a permanent place in my gear stash, and it’s a rare spate of precipitation that doesn’t result in the Typhoon seeing some action.
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