Make: Coolibar | Model: Performance Sun Bandana UPF 50+ | Year: 2018 | 53g | $18.00
Problem: you are a bit short on hair
Problem: you hate sunscreen
Problem: you like the Lawrence of Arabia sun cape look (or, at least the practical sun protection that it provides)
Also problem: you like to hike in mesh baseball caps for breathability but worry about all that sun coming down hard on your head
Solution: bandana + baseball cap?
Despite never having actually been burnt through the mesh on my baseball cap I decided to keep my winning streak against the sun unbroken by picking up a white Coolibar bandana off Amazon. This isn’t a brand that’s typically associated with backpacking but it is typically associated with sun protection per Amazon’s search engine, so here we are.
The claimed dimensions are 24″ x 24″ but mine was a paltry 24″ x 23″, although that’s actually an error in my favor: this thing is huge. Granted I’ve never worn or used a bandana before but what I had imagined doing was placing one of the corners at the peak of my forehead and then having the remaining corners hanging down to the sides and behind my head, providing complete top-of-head coverage as well as ear and back-of-neck coverage. What actually happened is that the side corners were draped over my shoulders and actually came to rest just in front of and below my armpits, and the rear corner was touching the small of my back. As a person of average height I found this to be a bit too much sun protection. Rotating the bandana 45 degrees so that the peak of my forehead was at the midpoint of one of the edges actually worked slightly better in that it was no longer covering my shoulders and only hung about halfway down my back.
I had also imagined using it as a prefilter for filling up water bottles but never actually attempted this.
In any case, it just isn’t practical with a backpack – there’s too much fabric flapping around to not get bunched up on the shoulder straps or pack itself. Having three-quarters of your head covered in fabric also isn’t great for breathability, and despite the thin white fabric I found it got stuffy after a while. Folding it helped somewhat with the sizing but the thicker fabric also felt strange and stuffy under the cap.
It also looks dorky, although if you regularly hike with a sun cape you’ve already crossed that particular line.
Before trying this bandana I was regularly hiking with the Outdoor Research Trucker Sun Runner, about which I had only two complaints:
- “No” sun protection for the mesh back of the cap (recall that I had never been burnt or even turned red while using the cap without sunscreen)
- The elastic band and snapback loop, whose promise was the ability to add a sun cape to any trucker hat, would often slide off/invert during breaks or at night and required fiddling to fix
I have since decided that sun capes compromise breathability too much. I now use an Outdoor Research Sun Bucket as my go-to backpacking hat whether I need sun protection or not. The short brim provides 360 degree sun protection during the part of the day when you actually need it (when the sun is directly overhead), does a good enough job of keeping rain off of your face, and doesn’t impact your peripheral vision. The most satisfying part, though, is feeling a breeze blowing across your neck on a hot day.
However, if you’re still interested in the sun cape idea I think that the Outdoor Research Sun Runner or Outdoor Research ActiveIce Cap (discontinued?) would be better options. The former has a sun cape that attaches via buttons on the brim and thus has no fiddling but the cap itself doesn’t appear to have great ventilation since the cape covers most of the side mesh when in use. The latter is a single-piece design (the sun cape is not detachable) but the mesh sides of the hat aren’t blocked at all by the sun cape since it’s attached to the bottom of the hat via stitching.
I would like to point out that both of the previous OR hats have solid non-mesh tops which makes me feel like my fears of being burnt through the mesh on a trucker hat are somewhat validated.