Get a proper jacket

Joonas Laakso
Aug 27, 2017 · 8 min read

This story is about what I learned when buying a ridiculously overblown jacket solution to my weather woes.

I live in Helsinki, Finland. The weather is pretty bad for most of the year — since we’re on the shoreline, it’s frequently windy and wet. In the winter we’re lucky if we get snow, as more often it’s freezing but not quite frozen rain or sleet.

I think of sleet as angry rain. Whatever I did to it I don’t know, but it sure feels personal.

I have a problem with just the wind. For some reason I can’t quite put into words, I find heavy wind very off-putting and it makes irritable.

Background

As a teenager I used to wear an Alpha Industries M65 year round, but they don’t make them like they used to, and they’re charging a lot more for a worse product. You can get some allegedly nice jackets from military surplus, but I don’t like the military connotations. I don’t want to look like a soldier.

Since then my wardrobe has been a series of what I think of as “fashion jackets”, as opposed to functional jackets. They’re cheap (the ones I get are), they don’t last very long, and they’re not very useful. They do the bare minimum of shielding you from the elements, as long as the weather isn’t actually bad.

I was inspired by getting a really good backpack from Chrome (the Dually; they don’t make it anymore). It’s served me daily and on all travels for six years now, and looks like it may have several more in it. Surely someone makes jackets with the same functionality first approach?

I prefer to have one really good item of any given sort instead of, say, a rack full of jackets. For one thing it tends to cost more to get several, and the other thing is that I just really like well made things.

I started wondering if an “outdoors” type jacket instead of these cheap ones made for city use would make sense. I do next to no outdoor activities at all, but just getting around town in Helsinki weather feels like enough justification to gear up properly.

Arc’teryx Beta LT Hybrid

In the end I picked up an Arc’teryx Beta LT Hybrid hard shell at 380€. I’ve only had it for a few days now, but it already feels like a great decision.

It’s hard to find information on this specific model — most stories are about an older or newer revision. I can’t even link to it because the manufacturer’s site doesn’t acknowledge it.

The important bits: it’s 2.5 ply Gore-Tex Pro made from 40 denier ripstop nylon. The only features of note that don’t have to do with the cut or the qualities of the fabric are two external “boob pockets” (riding high to accommodate the presence of a harness on the hip level), pit zips (optional ventilation for armpits), two minimal velcro straps for adjusting the cuffs, and a drop hood (collar is separate).

Things you might miss: inside pockets, stow space for hood.

What is a hard shell?

Why a hard shell? A hard shell is basically a highly technical raincoat. It’s designed to keep out all the water and wind the world might throw at you. Unlike conventional (cheap) raincoats, a hard shell breathes relatively well. Most of them don’t come with any sort of liner, so they pack easy and light.

There are a ton of options out there, but in the end it came down to the very nicest models my local outdoors shop Partioaitta carries, by Marmot and Arc’teryx. I tried all the cheaper, non-liner models, as well, but the best in class simply wear better, look better, and make zero compromises in details. What’s more, you can easily spend almost as much as the top of the line models and get a far lesser product.

If there’s a “hard” shell, surely a “soft” shell exists, too? That it does. A soft shell basically keeps you warm. They are very, very comfortable to wear, a second skin type thing. What they don’t really do is keep out the rain; most models are water repellent to a degree, but they won’t help in actual rain. Same thing for wind. No matter how much I liked the Marmot soft shells, I couldn’t justify them to myself.

The problems with conventional raincoats are that they look daft in most cases, they weigh a lot, and they don’t breathe at all. They are cheap, though. If that was all there is to it, I probably would’ve gone with a cheaper model hard shell, but turns out there’s a lot of detail Arc’teryx gets just right.

So what’s so good about this jacket?

First off, the water and wind proofness. I don’t see much sense spending hundreds of Euro on a weatherproof jacket unless it’s actually weatherproof. The Arc’teryx hard shells are. All the zippers are silicone coated and tuck away into a cover when zipped up. Every seam is taped. (The zippers are not guaranteed to be weatherproof, but they are way more protected than any zipper you’ll find in a lesser coat. Arc’teryx calls them watertight.)

A big deal for me was getting a good hood. I’ve had it with useless hoods — a hood should protect you from the elements, not just sort of cover your head and mess up your hair. My Beta LT Hybrid comes with a hood that’s roomy enough to accommodate most helmets, not to mention any sort of beanie or baseball cap.

A great detail is that the collar is separate from the hood; you can leave the hood down and zip up all the way to still be very secure (a “drop hood” design). There’s a lovely little patch of fleece on the inside of the collar for a nicer feel to your jaw when the collar is zipped up tight. The hood design in general is just better than most competition: you have good peripheral vision without exposing your face, and a semi hard lip on top keeps the water off your face. The hood is adjustable in depth and circumference to prepare you for better ventilation or clamping down in a storm.

Breathability is the number one reason why you’d want a hard shell instead of a raincoat. The Beta LT Hybrid breathes very well when walking around the city. I haven’t done any heavy exercise yet, so can’t say how it performs then, but considering it was built for mountaineering, it should be quite alright. The jacket does have pit zips for added ventilation, which is very welcome for me, and which are lacking from most versions of this coat. (I’m still not quite sure, but I think the “Hybrid” part of the name refers to this specific version.)

Something I had never considered in a jacket before is posture. The Beta LT Hybrid is cut so that when you raise your arms, the jacket does not move with your arms, but stays put on your waist to protect you from accidentally exposing your under layers to the elements. I want this in, like, all the jackets from now on. (This detailing is called a gusset.)

Many jackets are designed bafflingly to be worn without carrying anything with you. I go everywhere with my backpack, and it tends to be loaded semi heavy, so my jacket needs to stay out of the way of my straps and not get in the way of adjusting the bag. My only quibble here is that I need to reach under my straps to open up the pit zips, but since I can do that without taking off the backpack, it gets a pass from me.

The Beta LT Hybrid is very light, even if it’s not part of Arc’teryx’s “super light” range. It’s for sure lighter than any coat I’ve ever worn. The weight isn’t really an issue when walking around town, but it does matter when you consider if you’d pack the coat in your day pack. On top of that you can roll up the coat into its hood into a very snug little package — not Patagonia Houdini small, but smaller than any other jacket I’ve ever had.

Endurance

These coats are made for active mountaineering. Rappelling, climbing, sleeping on cliff faces, in rain and snow. When they say that it is durable, it’s against that expectation. Reviews have people saying they’ve had their comparable hard shells for over a decade of heavy use. My daily city use likely never reaches the requirements of grinding against granite, but if that ever becomes a thing, at least I know my expensive coat is up for it and doesn’t need to be handled with care.

Warmth

What the hard shell doesn’t do at all is insulation. You’re expected to wear temperature appropriate layers underneath. The coat is cut loose to accommodate, but it manages to look sharp even when you’re just sporting a tee shirt underneath.

Looks

And how sharp! I absolutely adore that the only non-functional detail in the whole package is the understated Arc’teryx log on the front. The coat looks like a tool in the best possible sense. Yes, anybody can tell that you’re wearing an outdoors jacket, but as I hope I’ve established by now, I live by the sea and I’ve had it with this weather.

Conclusion

Something to note is that when you’re getting a hard shell, you’re not buying an item of clothing. You’re buying gear. Gear requires maintenance, and you need to consider that the coat should be washed regularly, and coated with durable water repellant spray.

I expect this to be the last coat I’m going to need in a long while. If it gets really, really cold in the winter, maybe I still need to dig out my shitty M65 clone with a heavy liner (and poor breathability, and poor protection from rain), but I don’t really expect that to be the case. The Beta should serve me well if I ever go snowboarding again, or hiking in the woods in basically any weather or time of year, or sitting down in a windy place, or just dealing with another afternoon downpour in Helsinki.

Also, bonus! Doing the research on which expensive, light, actually weatherproof jacket to get, you’re going to learn a lot about how your body manages heat, how different textile materials and combinations work, and what exactly makes the coat so damn expensive. And why it’s worth it. Didn’t you always want to be an adventure clothing geek? You’ll know so many new words and abbreviations! (My favorite is that the Arc’teryx items are known as dead birds in the outdoors scene.)

The local outdoors shop staff was so happy about my choice. In her words it’s the best coat in the world, and so far I can’t really challenge that.

Bottom line? I can’t wait for the fall rains and winds to hit in force. I am ready. (Now, what about my heavy duty raw denim pants and leather shoes… I wonder if I could make those weatherproof, too, without looking like I’m living in the woods?)

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Joonas Laakso
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