Merino or Synthetic base layers?

[Diplomatic Mike]

Sorry Dan. Dry doesn't always = warm.
I've been dry and cold many times.
I'm not talking about theory, but my experience.
I hike in a different climate from you, so maybe different rules apply.

[Eric Fredricksen]

I don't like the stink of synthetic, and it also feels uncomfortable to me. Kind of hot and cold at the same time.

All those sheep can't be wrong.

[Roger Caffin]

Hi Mike

> Wool is exothermic, so it should keep you at whatever temp you are at.

A much vaunted advantage, but when tested in the Lab the effect is found to be very close to zero. Yes, we did test it (at CSIRO Textile Physics).

I find the synthetics to be more comfortable, and faster drying.

Cheers

[Roger Caffin]

> All those sheep can't be wrong.
They also get turned into lamb chops. So much for logic.

Cheers

[Jason Elsworth]

Over the past 30 years I have tried both. In recent times I have gone to wool. I started out with a light tight fitting simple crew neck design. Then I decided that I wanted something even lighter with a higher neck and a zip for better heat regulation (hot and cool). I didn't get this design in such a tight fit (they just didn't seem to be styled as tight) and agree with Eric that this was mistake. However it is good for warmer conditions, but is compromised in terms of performing a true base layer.

I prefer the feel of wool next to the skin, but I haven't found it very durable and holes have appeared after washing in a top loading machine. For cool weather I am probably going to go back to the tighter wool fit, maybe with a buff to keep my neck warm. I am also going to try one of the newer synthetics, as i want something quicker drying for when it is wet.

I have to come clean and admit to trying the whole stockings thing back in the day. It could explain a lot :).

[Brett Peugh]

Why not just bring a short sleeved poly or poly blend for the warm stuff and a longsleeved wool for when it is cooler?

The Patagonia Merino 1/2 stuff is also a blend if you want a little good out of each.

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

"Sorry Dan. Dry doesn't always = warm.
I've been dry and cold many times."

I think my post was pretty clear that when it's a choice between being dry or wet, dry will be warmer. I wasn't saying that when you're dry then you're guaranteed to be warm.

I can certainly understand the arguments that wool is more comfortable and less smelly. I don't have a problem with the comfort or smelly-ness of synthetics but I can see how people would prefer merino for these reasons. If I was guaranteed nice dry hiking conditions then I would consider merino. I just don't like having to deal with it in really sloppy conditions and I like to be prepared for the worst.

Last month I was out hiking for 8 days and we had several days straight of rain & snow. Doing laundry in these conditions wasn't feasible because there was really no way to hang dry stuff with the humidity and frequent precipitation. My 1.9oz synthetic tee shirt was great because it dried quickly if I got it wet, and if I wanted to wash it I could wring it out, put it back on and have it dry again very quickly. That kept me a lot more warm and comfortable than a damp merino shirt would have.

[James holden]

here's a quick test some old geezer showed me to determine if a base layer dries quick enough

before you sleep wring soak yr layer totally in water for a few minutes … wring it out … and go to sleep with it next to your skin

if you can
– fall asleep comfortably
– the layer is dry when you wake up

it passes …

if it doesnt it fails

in cold humid, or just darn cold environments … body heat is the only thing that can dry out your clothes (or the stove but you dont want to waste fuel thats needed for melting)

try it for yourselves and decide

[Anonymous]

"I find the synthetics to be more comfortable, and faster drying."

+1 And more durable in the bargain.

[Brett Peugh]

Well, I took a Patagonia Wool 3 in XL and soaked in cold water for about 3 minutes. It seemed to dry in a little over 6 hours by itself so it is possible to dry the wool when you are sleeping. Granted it was in a small closet like a tent and it is not too humid out but I think I could still put it on in the morning and dry it with body heat pretty fast.

[John Davis]

Brett, you can't beat experimentation.

Also, if your walk concludes with a long descent, you should be pretty dry by the time you find a pitch. On a recent trip where I was able to enjoy 11 straight days of showery weather, I kept my eVent jacket on while pitching the tarp, collecting water and finding a few handfuls of air-dried birch. By the time I got under the tarp, I was completely dry.

I find if I climb a hill shirtless, I get sweaty. If it is humid, I get sweatier. Any clothing aggravates the problem. The more I have to wear, the wetter I get. The only time I have ever walked vigorously without feeling damp on my skin was in the American desert, where the rate of evaporation was impressive. My solution on most of my recent trips (Scotland and the Pyrenees) has been a combination of wool and synthetics.

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

"I took a Patagonia Wool 3 in XL and soaked in cold water for about 3 minutes. It seemed to dry in a little over 6 hours by itself so it is possible to dry the wool when you are sleeping."

Your house is likely far warmer and much less humid than the inside of your tent on an average night. This will have a huge effect on drying time.

To do this test accurately, you'd need to simulate the average nightly temperature and humidity in your tent (40F & 95% maybe?) which is really hard to simulate, so it would be best to just try it. I've tried it on a couple occasions but I've never been able to get a merino shirt go from wrung out to pretty much dry just by hanging it inside my tent for 1 night. Next time you go out, bring a spare shirt just to try this and see for yourself. Often it will be drier, but still quite a ways from dry.

Ideally you'd also use a scale so you know how close to it's dry weight the shirt is really at. Merino can hold a lot of moisture while 'seeming' fairly dry, so there can be a long damp period before you actually arrive at a dry shirt.

My wild guess is that your shirt would take 3-5x as long to dry in average night-time conditions in a tent.

On a recent hike I had 2 pairs of socks. Both of similar thickness but one pair was synthetic and the other was 100% wool. Normally when my socks are wet I wring them out and wear them to bed where my foot heat can dry them. I have done this in the past often with my synthetic socks. Usually the socks are mostly dry in about 2 hours (which is how long it usually takes me to fall asleep anyways). After 2 hours they start to provide noticeable insulation to my feet and I would estimate they are 100% dry around the 3-4 hour mark.

On this trip, one night I dried my synthetic socks using this technique and then the next night I went to do the same thing with my wool socks expecting a similar result. After a couple hours they didn't feel any drier. I fell asleep and woke up a few times and finally around the 5-6 hour point I just took them off because they still weren't even close to dry. They were still stealing heat instead of insulating and thus keeping my feet cold. I'm not bringing 100% wool socks again because I can't reliably dry them once they are wet and it's really easy to get socks wet.

[Diplomatic Mike]

What are the circumstances that you guys are getting your shirt soaked, and need to dry it?
My merino base never comes off, wether it's a weekend or week or more. I might wash it at the end of a trip to meet the 'public'. :)

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

"What are the circumstances that you guys are getting your shirt soaked, and need to dry it?"

My goal is to be prepared for the worst conditions that I might reasonably encounter. Aside from washing, my shirts do not get soaked on a regular basis, but it does happen occasionally and I like to be able to recover my comfort quickly if it does.

Some possible ways to get your shirt soaked:

1) Washing it when the weather appears well suited for hang drying the shirt, but then the weather takes a turn for the worse and you can't hang dry it.

2) Falling while crossing a stream.

3) Not putting your rain gear on quick enough because you had more important things to do. This summer my wife and I were on an alpine ridge and a rain system blew in quickly. She was already really cold so I helped her get her rain gear on to ensure she stayed dry rather than donning mine immediately. By this point I was half wet and she was still really cold, so I opted to set up the tent next to get her inside to warm up. By this point I was soaked but it didn't really matter because I got in the tent also, wrung out my shirt and it was dry relatively shortly. It rained all night and was 100% humidity so I don't think any hanging clothes would have dried at all.

4) Going fishing away from camp while your mostly dry shirt is hanging on a clothes line back at camp to air out those last traces of hiking sweat. I asked my wife to take it down if it started to rain. It started to rain and she forgot all about the shirt :)

5) Losing your rain jacket

6) Having your rain jacket fail you by not being waterproof in extended rain.

That's just a few examples. None of them are very common, but the collective risk is high enough that a soaked shirt does happen occasionally…at least to me.

With a very lightweight synthetic shirt, my soaked shirt strategy is to get somewhere protected, wring out the shirt and wear it until it's dry which doesn't take long. With merino, my strategy would be different because it's not feasible to sit in your tent wearing a wet merino shirt waiting for it to dry. With merino I would wring it out and take it off if it was truly soaked. I would do without it that night and then hopefully the weather the next day would be warm and dry enough that I could hike in it to dry it. If the next day was still cold and rainy then I probably wouldn't wear it because it would make me colder and it wouldn't dry very fast.

[Diplomatic Mike]

Fair enough if you need that mental protection. Personally i've never had any of those things happen to me in the past, so i don't worry about it. As i said, i never take it off. My base has only become damp, and still remains comfortable, and that's sometimes been in a week of rain.

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

This is not about mental protection.

I'm safe guarding my physical well-being against an unlikely, but possibly dangerous situation. You seem happy to just believe getting wet never happen to you. You might not think soaked clothing is a big deal, but if you get hit with soaked clothing and unexpectedly cold weather you could be in a lot of trouble some day. You might want to think about how you will deal with it.

Anyways….it's almost 4am. I'm off to bed.

[Diplomatic Mike]

Enjoy your sleep Dan, it's 11.55am over here. :)
I'm well aware of the dangers of wet clothing in cold temps. I take great care to avoid getting wet. It's worked for the last 30 odd years in the Scottish Highlands.
I must admit to a few soakings many moons ago when i was a novice. In those days i carried a much heavier pack with lots of spare clothing.

[Brett Peugh]

Granted, the testing wasn't fully scientific but the temp was about 67F and the half closet was less space than my double rainbow and has no air movement. On top of that the Wool 3 is a bit heavier that a baselayer Wool I would wear at 230g/m2 while an Ibex Indie Hoody is 195g/m2 a BPL Light Merino UL Shirt is 115g/m2 and a BPL Beartooth Hoody is 150g/m2 all of which should dry much faster. I am going to be soaking my ss 50/50 T and seeing how fast that dries along with my R.5 and R1 since the R.5 seem to be an equivalent insulation to the Wool 3 according to Patagonia.

I think people should make sure their Wool baselayer is at least 18.5 micron stuff if they don't want it developing holes and wearing through as fast. That 16.5 stuff is just not enough for durability and the 17.5 is not much better.

In addition, REI is now making a really thin Powerdry Baselayer that does tend to help knock down the stink and seems comparable to Capilene 2 so that might be an option.

[Travis Leanna]

I just got a Patagonia baselayer that is a 73% wool, 27% polyester blend. The best of both worlds? I dunno.

I haven't had it out for testing, but it was very comfortable just wearing it around the house and yard yesterday.

Does anyone have other wool/synthetic blends?

[James holden]

In rhe spirit of things i hand washed one of my thicker merino tops and mu cap 4 last night and hung them out to dry

neither was dry in the morning … The difference was that the inside of the cap 4 was much dryer on the inside due to the grid pattern there and the wicking … Im fact with a good wringing the cap was just lightly damp on the inside right after getting soaked

temp was around 10 C with 100% humidity … I hung them out under cover last night witg a rainstorm

so in typical PNW neither would have dried by simply hanging

which goes back to the point that you need to sleep or warm yr clothes to dry them in bad weather up here

[Will Webster]

Umm… At 100% humidity evaporation just isn't going to happen.

[Brett Peugh]

The Terramar Pioneer Crew took just as long to dry as the Wool 3 if not a little bit more. The ss 50/50 even moreso with the R.5 behind that and the R1 dead last. I am sure that these could have been worn after 8 hours of sleep and body heat would have dried them out pretty fast.

Either way I would say to try and not get wet and bring a back up baselayer just in case you are in conditions where that might happen if it is cold and wet because you might not want to cold and wet as you wait for your baselayer to dry on you or by itself.

[Brad Groves]

There's an awful lot of fuss about how wool takes horribly longer than synthetic to dry. I own tubs full of both, and have soaked both materials and then seen how long it takes them to dry. In the pleasant 30-40*F rain I seem to find myself hiking in somewhat regularly, both synthetics and wool are still a bit wet in the morning if I just hung them or tossed them in a pile.

If I keep the wet layers on, whether wool or synthetic, my body heat dries them in a half hour or less. Consider wearing base layers in a VBL… wool or synthetic, I layer up over the damp baselayers and things're dry in 20-30 minutes. I have used and compared wools and synthetics well below 0*F, so yeah, these are things I've experienced rather than armchair quarterbacked.

My recollection of that study was that there was a 5-10 minute dry time difference. Honestly, you won't notice that in the field.

People talk about wool pilling. Guess what? I've had plenty of synthetics pill, too! Wear any material long enough and it'll start to show, um, wear.

The talk about extended bad conditions is funny. Yes, I regularly travel in days and days of cold and wet. I find myself more comfortable… and equivalently dry… in wool. I have not found that my wool stays wet for days, at all.

I would note that synthetic shirts exacerbate evaporative heat loss. If your synthetic shirt gets soaked and dries super quickly in cold conditions, it'll likely cool you more than a wool one would. That's part of the temperature regulation benefit of wool. Some similar points in warm weather.

So much for logic, eh, Roger? Come on, now… geese get turned into food, do you take that to mean down doesn't work? That argument is… demonstrably weak. I find it amusing how much of the materials & insulation development we see ultimately tries to mimic the natural world. Maybe there's something to that thousands (millions) of years of evolution that we haven't been able to best in the past 100 years.

I have several tubs worth of synthetic clothing. Since buying my first merino wool pieces, the synthetic stuff has stayed in the tubs, in storage. No reason or desire to wear it any longer.

There is only one condition for which I've still sometimes found synthetics preferable: paddling in bad, cold weather without a dry top. A 100-wt fleece seems to deal with lake water dribbles up the sleeves a bit better. That said, I've been fine sticking with wool in similar conditions.

It's amazing that our ancestors, the world 'round, even survived all those centuries in horrid conditions without synthetic clothing. Oh. Wait. They did have wool…

[James holden]

Umm… At 100% humidity evaporation just isn't going to happen.

welcome to the west coast … lol

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