Kombi Knuckle Over leather gloves worked great in bitter, sometimes, wind-driven cold these past few months. You’ve got one color option, and that would black on black. We couldn’t ask for more in a five-finger all purpose insulated glove.

Soft, supple, and rugged leather outer glove shell construction is your first clue as to the quality and utility of these Kombi Knuckle-over gloves. Not to be confused with the sister Kombi knuckle-over leather mitts, these Kombi five-finger gloves offered as much insulation, warmth, and weather protection we could hope for without going to the mitten style.

There are advantages and disadvantages between the mitten style and the five-finger style of Kombi knuckle-over leather gloves that primarily have to do with the severity of the cold. Mitten style insulated gloves keep your fingers together and allow your digits to keep one another warm in severe cold, but you lack dexterity. The five-finger style allows you to use your hands and fingers, but since each finger is individually insulated, you don’t have the ability for the fingers to radiate heat amongst each other.

The five-finger Kombi Knuckle Over leather gloves we tested were used in some pretty cold weather in the Sierra Nevada and San

Rough-out leather is used on glove palms for grip and durability.

Jacinto mountains this winter. While wearing them during active treks on snow-bound journey’s with a backpack, daypack, on snow shoes or crampons, these gloves are warm even when the temperature went down into single digits. It was when activity stopped and everything chills down, we did experience the lower limits of this glove.

When you are not active, after the tent has been erected, the food and hot liquids were consumed, cold hands are just that, cold: until you get moving and the blood going. By contrast, donning into these Kombi Knuckle Over’s (KO) in the earliest hours of the pre-dawn morning – with the boots on and having recently slipped out of a nice Kelty Foraker -15° down sleeping bag — your body is warm, your fingers fully operable, these Kombi KO’s insulate immediately.

Now the “Knuckle Over” deal simply means you have a flexible leather pleat at the top of your hand so your bony knuckles give your hand full dexterity from fist to flat. You also have flex-joints that facilitate the lower two knuckles of each hand for enhanced dexterity.

Cuff collar allows you to seal out weather and bind you to your parka.

No, you don’t have the all-around dexterity you’d expect from leather driving gloves. There are several layers of insulation in addition to the leather shell. Weatherproofing is the responsibility of liners of Gore-Tex and Accu-Dri. For warmth Kombi looked to X-loft, a synthetic insulation. The synthetic fleece lining next to your skin is soft and comfortable. With all your fingers in the right cocoon, these Kombi’s are nice to wear. A bonus is the quality of the black leather. Like we said, it’s soft and supple visually as well so they look almost like cold weather dress gloves.

Stitching quality is accurate and tight throughout these gloves. The palms of these gloves are of rough-out black leather on top of the soft glove leather. Sturdy wrist straps and cuff closure cords allow you to really secure these gloves and get into them or out of them all day long.

And because these gloves use several layers of specific liner materials, you have to take care when removing these gloves from your fingers. The reason is that each liner is its own barrier, working in harmony with the other unique layers to keep weather out and warmth insulation in. Therefore none of these layers are sewn together.

If you just yank them off, well, it’s your fault and you should not be allowed to wear them ever again. That’s a good way to kill good

Wrist strap is easy to cinch up or release.

gloves. Many modern insulated gloves are built like this. You have to be conscious of taking them off carefully so they’ll fit like a glove when you put them on. It’s not a big deal to get used to.

The Kombi leather is top-notch and something you instantly appreciate about these high-quality gloves. For price, you’re looking at less than $100.00. For quality, you should expect to pay more than $100.00 in this writers view. You do get a rough-and-tumble cold weather working glove that you can do most hand functions with them. There great when you’re using hand tools like a snow shovel, ice-ax, or a flashlight.

Overall we appreciate this style and build of cold weather glove. It’s suited for many cold weather activities winter board sports to just plain being out in the cold. They have limitations at the single digit temps where you are not active. This non-active state must include the reality of the entire body cooling down and in need of outside warmth like down insulation or a camp fire. When you are on the move, they keep your hands warm and insulated. The jury is out on the quality or durability of the hardware for the wrist strap and cuff cinches. But we view these gloves as high-quality in general.

Below are four primary ways you can lose heat from your body. These are four areas each of the unique, stand-alone, liners such as Gore-Tex, are designed to protect and insulate you from the harshness of cold environments:

Kombi leather cold weather gloves worked great for snowshoeing.Here are the four general elements that these Kombi Knuckle Over gloves address:

• EVAPORATION: Heat loss from the cooling effects of moisture on the skin. Kombi’s wicking linings address this by moving the perspiration on your hands away from the skin to the outer shell of the glove or mitten.

• CONDUCTION: Heat loss caused by direct heat transfer from something warm to something cold (placing a bare hand on a cold window for example). Kombi’s full wrap construction using the various components of shell, insulation and lining insulate against this type of heat loss.

Gore-Tex lining can be considered a standard of all weather capability.

• CONVECTION: Heat loss as a result of natural body heat escaping into the air. The Kombi multi-layered construction minimizes body heat loss by trapping air in the various components of each style.

• RADIATION: Heat loss due to the transfer of heat from a warm environment to a cold one. Here again the Kombi multi-layered system, and in particular our use of waterproof/breathable inserts, works to minimize heat loss due to radiation.

Sierra Designs Arrow Rock 30: Compact N’ Warm

In reviewing any significant piece of gear, we try not to assess any product from just one trip in the field. While evaluating the new 2010 Sierra Designs Arrow Rock 30 down sleeping bag, it was used for five backcountry trips. These trips were mostly backpacking hikes in the Sierra Nevada and San Bernardino mountain ranges of California, and the Gila National Forest of southwestern New Mexico.

Elevation for all of these trips ranged between 7,000 feet above sea level to more than 11,000 feet. Fall nighttime temperatures at these altitudes varied from lows of 40° F to less than 30°, where overnight frost would settle on the tents and forest floor.

The Arrow Rock 30 is a cool to moderately cold temperature sleeping back filled with 600-series down insulation. Sierra Designs rates this as a three-season sleeping bag, but it seams well suited for all seasons depending upon your shelter types and geographic region.

When the mercury dropped below 30° in high elevation conditions, there was never a sense of chill or lack of warmth. Most nights, my shelter was either a Hilleberg Kaitum 3 or a Kelty Foxhole 3 four-season tent that would provide a conservative 5° of warmth as I was the only human sole in these three-man tents. Some cool nights, I’d wiggle into the Arrow Rock 30 with my Mountain Khakis flannel-lined pants on simply because it was cold and windy outside — and there was no question I’d be scooting outside before sunrise to break down camp and fire up the MSR Reactor stove for coffee and oatmeal. So for folks who tend to sleep with pants and foundational torso insulation on, this Arrow Rock 30 can keep you warm well below its rating.

On nights where the temperature did not drop into the low-40’s or mid-30’s, the Arrow Rock is a roaster! There were several nights where I’d heat up in the middle of the night and zip the sleeping bag open almost the full length of the Large (for people taller than 6-foot), and just use it as a quilt since the temperature was too cold to lay on top of the bag.

For this reason, and speaking for myself, this is an ideal sleeping bag for so many kinds of high-elevation or cool weather scenarios, since I could merely adjust my sleeping arrangement depending on the overnight temperatures. However, my confidence for staying warm was never shaken regardless of how cold it got under the conditions I used the Arrow Rock 30 for. This is just one of several primary qualities I valued about the Arrow Rock 30; it kept me warm in the fall, at upper elevations.

A chest pocket is built in for your wallet and keys at night. The left-hand side zipper is sturdy and non-binding. Upper torso and hood offer lots of room to toss and turn.

It made no difference to my perspective that 600-series down fill is used in this sleeping bag rather than the commonly regarded superior insulation capabilities of 750-to-850 premium down fills that might have been considered for this sleeping bag. The initial price (MSRP $219.00 U.S.) of the sleeping bag would have been much greater if the higher-order down fills where used. But there’s an even more rational reason for using 600-series down insulation for the Arrow Rock 30…you don’t need any more insulation than the 600 fill provides.

Another instantly recognized quality this down sleeping bag manifested soon as it was pulled out of the stuff sack was the lofting capability. Regardless of how long the sleeping bag was packed away on a trip, within a few minutes of setting up the tent and unfurling the Arrow Rock 30, the down insulation would loft-up to its full “puff.” That right there tells me, the bag is worthy of keeping me warm. The baffle-technology and the overall bag construction are design details that vary from bag to bag, and manufacturer to manufacturer. But if your down insulated sleeping bag can’t loft up within minutes of taking it out of the stuff sack, it’s a bad omen for warmth, and a confidence crusher for quality of the down fill.

As a person who weighs more than 200 pounds and stands more than six-feet tall, the Sierra Designs trademarked technology called “Flex” allowed me to curl-up or stretch out in a myriad of ways without the sleeping bag binding me in. Flex allows the bag outer shell and liner material to move with the sleeper by eliminating constriction and forming to the body when lying still, thereby continuously providing warmth and maximum insulation. With it’s “mummy” style shape, the Arrow Rock 30 never presented the sense of claustrophobic restriction traditional mummy-style sleeping bags are sometimes known for.

Housed in its stuff sack, the SD Arrow Rock 30 fit easily into the sleeping bag section of the Lowe-Alpine TFX Cerro Torre 65:85 backpack along with the new Therm-A-Rest NeoAir sleeping pad.

Just as valuable a consideration when observing the qualities the Arrow Rock 30 offered was the pack size and weight of the sleeping bag. Mercy! Since many modern backpacks include a bottom compartment just for the sleeping bag, the Arrow Rock 30 simply rocks. No kidding here. Backpacks such as the Lowe/Alpine TFX Cerro Torre 65:85 and the more traditional Kelty Trekker external-frame pack accommodated the Arrow Rock 30 (in its stuff sack) with enough additional room for the NeoAir sleeping pad, two pairs of gloves, and a Gerber short-handled camp ax. At 2lbs, 9 ounces, the size and weight of this sleeping bag in its compact form is, perhaps, the coolest single thing about the Arrow Rock 30 if you take the warmth out of the equation.

While living with the SD Arrow Rock 30 on backpacking trips, the sleeping pad that was used is the new Therm-A-Rest NeoAir. This combination of sleeping bag and sleeping pad could not have worked out better. One of the features modern down sleeping bags tend to provide are retaining straps on the underside of the sleeping bag, and the Arrow Rock 30 accommodated the Neo-Air sleeping bag as if the two were designed by the same product planning team. The Arrow Rock 30 retaining straps kept the Neo-Air sleeping pad under the bag throughout the nights, and there was never an issue with having something between my body and the floor of the tent.

In writing third-party product reviews, our experience in the past 25 years has taught us that readers don’t need to necessarily want to know the technical engineering details of a product so much as they want to know if it worked, and whether there are any significant weaknesses they should consider in making a purchase decision. With the Arrow Rock 30, the overall impression is that this is a sleeping bag I’d take on any trip whether it be backpacking, four-wheel drive camping, horse back trip, or foreign travel. There were no significant drawbacks I would have you consider. So there you have it on the Sierra Designs Arrow Rock 30.

Review and photos by Rick Shandley

Specs:

Men’s Long
Price Point: MSRP $219.00
Temperature Rating / 30 F/ -1 C
Trail Weight: 2 lbs 9 oz
Zipper Side: Left
Stuff Size: 7″ x 17″
Insulation: 600-Fill Goose Down
Shell Material: 30D Polyester
Liner Material: 40D Polyester

Features:
Chest Pocket
Continuous Baffle Construction
Flex Technology
Tuck Stitch

Klymit Kinetic Vest

As we get ready to attend the Summer Outdoor Retail Show in Salt Lake City, Utah we were introduced to a company developing insulation technology that may truly add a new dimension to outdoor clothing. Klymit is an Ogden, UT company that has developed NobleTek insulation where any number of applications from jackets to sleeping bags can benefit from the use of Argon gas, fabrics, and lightweight construction.

This breakthrough system uses flexible, gastight yet breathable chambers filled with gas instead of down or fabric.  Klymit NobleTek is the only technology on the market that empowers outdoor enthusiasts to adjust their level of warmth with the turn of a dial.  This cutting-edge technology is set to revolutionize the outdoor industry, providing insulation that is not only adjustable, but warmer, thinner and lighter-weight than other insulators.   

Argon gas, which is said to be better at trapping warmth, is weightless, and retains its loft when inflated.  It also stays warm when wet, is windproof and eco-friendly.  The gases used by Klymit are non-toxic, non-flammable and completely safe for both the user and the environment. 

Gear constructed with Klymit NobleTek Insulation is likely to be less bulky than other insulators.  It is paper- thin, only 15mm (less than half an inch) when fully inflated, and collapses to less than 1mm when deflated.  This makes clothing easy to move around in when inflated, and easy to pack into small spaces when the gas is removed. 

You can get a good idea of how products using this technology are constructed by looking at the Klymit vest using NobleTek insulation. We’re really looking forward to seeing Klymit outdoor gear and conducting product reviews in the future. You’ll get more information by checking out their site: www.klymit.com