rain kilt = winner!

That's nice to know. I ordered one as well last week, but haven't received shipping confirmation yet. I'm also in Western NC and we sure do get a lot of rain here. Raining all weekend. :/

I believe that the garbage bag kilt was first mentioned by Colin Fletcher about 1975. He caller it "Colin's kilt" when he described it in one of the editions of his book "The Complete Walker". It is a good idea; cheap, light and easy to use.

I really like my cloud kilt. I was out the other day in a steady, light drizzle and walking through waist high thick vegetation that was wet. I was wearing a hard shell jacket, but didn't want to put on hard shell leggings as the rain wasn't that hard. However, I soon found that the wet vegetation was getting me wet and I was starting to feel chilled. I stopped for a few seconds and put on my cloud kilt and problem solved.

A long hard shell jacket that stops just above the knee, partnered with long gaiters and shorts, is the classic New Zealand tramping outfit for wet weather. However longer jackets are getting harder to find, but a rain kilt convents any short jacket to along one.

I received the ZPacks CloudKilt soon after starting this thread. I got to use it on another rainy hiking day soon thereafter. It was a big step up from the garbage bag.

The shock cord in the waist was too thin and didn't grip well in the tiny cordlock. Plus I felt I could use another tieoff tab when using the kilt as a tarp door. I emailed Joe about these things and he said "send it in!".

A week later the kilt was back, this time with a beefier shock cord and that extra tab. Excellent service yet again from ZPacks!

I used my cloud kilt during a storm last year, and hiked 10miles in the rain with no problems and it worked great.

I wore a ULA rain skirt on my 2011 TGO Challenge crossing of Scotland, generally with great success (and it was superb as a multi-use item) until one fierce day when high winds and driving rain forced everyone down from the hills. The skirt very quickly became a hat as the winds whipped it around so much that I was soon soaked beneath it.

This year I took a pair of waterproof trousers, something I've never liked, which proved to be more manageable in high winds but were otherwise fairly vile. Hot, uncomfortable, all of the things that led me to the rain skirt in the first place. Rain skirts are wonderfully simple things, but it's clear that a few tweaks are needed to mine if it's to cope with real storms rather than simply heavy falling rain. That's down to the fit of that particular model on me, rather than a flaw in the concept; the ZPacks version was used with success by others. On the Challenge this year I really missed my rain skirt and shan't be bothering with the waterproof trousers again for general hiking.

Jon wrote:

"The skirt very quickly became a hat as the winds whipped it around so much that I was soon soaked beneath it."

Great point. I had an idea while reading and visualizing your post. This is hard to verbalize but easy to visualize.

Imagine the bottom edge of the kilt at the point that is in line with your midline, i.e. the bottom leading edge. Imagine the bottom edge of the kilt 180 degrees from that, i.e. where the zipper closes. In high winds, what if you had a thin piece of shock cord connecting those two points, with enough slack so as not to impede your stride? But just enough of a connection to keep the kilt from blowing around all over the place.

Dunno, this may not work but it would be easy to rig up & try.

I ran into the maker of a rain shirt at the NW Folklife Festival. She is so close to a great hiking rain kilt. As it is, the design and quality is very good, but for women only.

http://www.wandergoods.com