March 2021 – Turigrinos

Half Bag/Quilt?

Is the down in the top half of your quilt redundant with the down in your puffy? In other words, could you save weight by wearing your down jacket to bed and using a shorter quilt? Yes. Potential Savings My current quilt is an Enlightened Equipment Enigma 20F in size long/wide, weighing 684g. My current jacket is an original Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer, 232g. So, any combination weighing less than 916g is an improvement. Nunatak's Akula half-bag weighs in at 454g for the 54" version, but that would go all the way up to my armpits. The 46" version would [...]

Wide-Brim Hats Don’t Interfere With Photochromic Sunglasses

On the tail-end of a recent eye exam I had a chance to ask the doc one of my longest-burning questions: do wide-brim hats interfere with the ability of photochromic lenses to darken in response to UV light? Her answer was no. For context, almost all photochromic lenses rely on ambient UV light in order to trigger the darkening effect. However, car windshields block the portion of the UV spectrum that the lenses are sensitive to, effectively reducing them to regular fixed-transmission sunglasses while driving. Since wide-brim hats block all of the direct sunlight that would otherwise hit the lenses, [...]