I tried a Rab Neutrino in a shop for comparison, and its simple zip-up fixed hood covers more – it would be nice to be able to hide a bit more inside the Ascent's hood, particularly as the snug collar will make wearing a scarf tricky. Even once all done up it doesn't offer as much protection to the face as fixed hoods. It does have a Velcro patch as well as the poppers and this helps to get your face covered, but this still isn't ideal. I also found the poppers that do the hood up at the front impossible to do use even with only thin fleece gloves on. And considering the popularity of hoodies amongst those sending hard problems and grit routes, it could even limit the Ascent's appeal for those cold Peak District mornings when the friction is good. If you are going to be wearing the Ascent as a jacket on its own and hence just over your mid-layers, this may not be a problem but makes it less suited for alpine and winter climbing where you use it as a booster layer over a Goretex or shoftshell. In comparison, my North Face Redpoint Optimus with its fixed hood, zips up easily over the same hooded sweatshirt. Anyone wearing it over a hooded anything – a softshell for example – is likely to have the same problem. This out of necessity needs to be quite a tight fit – so much so that just over a cotton hoody I had trouble doing it up fully. The second major problem with detachable hoods is that they mean the jacket needs a separate collar which is still there when the hood isn't attached. Of course you could add a few stitches and to make the hood virtually impossible to lose – problem solved? Not really. This is one reason why I'll stand by my assertion that a belay jacket should not have a detachable hood – the hood is so important to making a jacket warm. Pulling a 60 cm sling off from over your shoulder is a good way to un-pop some poppers, but it can be done even whilst just taking a rucksack off, or pulling a stuffed jacket out of your pack. I never detach hoods and hate it when they do so of their own accord, something that is easily done with hoods such as the popper attached one on the Ascent. The hood for me is the weak point of the jacket in one major sense – it is detachable. The RAB Ascent, a “trek & travel” and “mountain walking” down jacket If you want the ultimate warmth to weight ratio you simply have to pay more than the Ascent's relatively modest price and go for a box-walled jacket. Rab do make box-walled jackets, but they cost more. Box-walled jackets in cross-section look (unsurprisingly!) like a series of boxes stacked on each other, with no stitching through. ![]() What was very obvious from these thermal images were which jackets were a stitched-through construction and which were not: warmer colours were clearly visible along the lines of stitching on the sewn-through jackets, and not there on the box-walled jackets. The Finnish outdoor magazine Retki did a test of insulated jackets in a recent edition and one of their studies for the review was taking pictures of the jackets on test with a thermal imaging camera whilst they were worn in a freezer room. ![]() This is the easiest and hence cheapest way to make down jackets but has the disadvantage that with stitching going through the jacket it makes an un-insulated area. The construction of the jacket is stitched-through – if you could see a cross-section of the jacket it would look like a series of circles stacked on each other.
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