Sierra Designs Gnar Lite Jacket Review

November 7th, 2012 • BY

Sierra Designs Gnar Lite

I don’t camp in the rain. Or, at least I do my best to avoid it. But one weekend in July, despite my best efforts, I found myself in a tent at 12,000 feet with thunder groaning overhead and, you guessed it, rain. That’s when I began to see the utility of the Sierra Designs DriDown Gnar Lite women’s jacket ($229), which I had brought along as an emergency layer for the cold Colorado summer nights.

This 800-fill jacket is stuffed with DriDown, a relatively new hydrophobic down insulation that promises to stay drier than regular untreated down for ten times as long. Sierra Designs contends that this futuristic down, which is treated with a “molecular-level polymer to create a hydrophobic finish on each individual down plume,” retains 170 percent more loft than untreated down when exposed to moisture and humidity. It is also suggested that it dries 33 percent faster than untreated down. That’s a lot to live up to.

I found this 10-ounce jacket to be surprisingly lofty and cozy, and it did indeed hold up remarkably well in wet conditions, keeping me just as warm even when damp. While I felt cold when the jacket first got wet, I warmed up quickly as it began to dry out. Perhaps it’s the jacket’s light weight and its treated down’s molecular changes, but somehow it didn’t feel quite like down. Still, the slimmed-down, women’s-specific cut looked spiffy and I loved the thumb loops, which are rare in an insulated jacket.

This ultralight jacket is perfect to wear alone in the fall, spring, and sunny, mid-winter days, but we’d recommend a shell on top for those cold, blustery days yet to come. It’s also spot on to stuff it in the bottom of your pack—it compresses to the size of a Nalgene—as an emergency layer, or to keep handy by the door for drizzly late-night dog walks.

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Kate Siber

About

Kate Siber has worked as a pastry cook, a small-time farmer, a ski-rental tech, and a thankless-accounting drone, among other distinctive vocations, but the career she tried on and kept was writing. For the last eight years, Siber, a freelance writer and correspondent for Outside magazine, has traipsed the globe in search of stories, shooting blowguns with Amazonian tribes in Ecuador, tracking rhinos in South Africa, and diving with— More about this author →