Winter mittens for the cold handed

The warmest I have found are the OR altimitts. The hestra army leather extreme feels just as warm but is not quite as water resistant. The Mercury mitts are very warm, but the lobster claw liner drove me crazy.

I also use hand warmers and swap out very thin liner gloves every few hours. The best thing to do is keep mittens on before your hands get cold. Once cold, they take forever to warm up and mitts can only help so much. I also keep a 16oz thermos of hot coco. That warms you from the inside! At a certain point, mittens can only do so much. It goes without saying most of these mittens won’t let you do much of anything except grip a ski poles.

Honorable mention is for the OR highcamp mitt, which is my go to most winter days.

I have not tried the rbh but I bet they are some of the warmest you can buy.

The enlightened Equipment stronghold mittens are a great UL option as an over mitt.They probably aren’t meant for wearing all if the time, but they’ve held up well through a lot of use for me and they weigh just over an oz even for the thicker Apex. They do a great job of drawing moisture away from my baselayer and shell gloves well.

I get cold hands and feet easily and still the best way for me to warm up my extremities quickly is to wear more core layers and work hard (until just before sweating). Adding insulation to cold hands usually doesn’t do much, the warmth needs to come from elsewhere. However, obviously the right glove/mitten system can help them from getting cold in the first place. Cheers.

The other technique is to super-insulate her body core and force all the extra warm blood out to the extremities, so use a very warm vest and a warmer hat than normal; as well as adequate other layers appropriate to the temperature.

As Serge says

I also use the OR High-Camp 3 finger glove but not the supplied OR liners

“… the warmth needs to come from elsewhere. However, obviously the right glove/mitten system can help them from getting cold in the first place.”

+1

As a starting point consider “over dressing”, paying attention to the neck and head (a hoody), and overlapping the mittens, base layer sleeve cuffs, and jacket cuffs at the wrist (no gaps). Once warm hands are achieved you can back off on the over-kill to find the right combination of clothing.

What kind of application are you thinking of?  Is this an afternoon out at those temps, or multiple days out at those temps?  If it’s the latter a glove/mitten layering system can work….if it’s just an afternoon, you could just get a really warm pair of mittens.

The ultimate goal is a multiple day outing. This is likely to be 2-3 days at most. Most of the time, it will be used for one day outings. It would be nice if there were a layering system which could be used on either.

During our hike yesterday, she tried to use a polypro glove liner underneath lobster claw gloves because that has worked for her while cycling in moderate temperatures. However, the liners got wet quickly and made things worse. Not going to do that again. The lobster gloves then couldn’t keep her warm after that, but the BD mittens did the trick. She wore those mittens all the way down to the car even though it warmed up considerably.

My wife has quite cold hands, we were at a Sierra Trading Post outlet recently and she took quite a liking to some Arcteryx Atom mitts that were a surprisingly good price.

I use the Dachstein mitts for the temps you are asking about as my warmth layer. I use OR MT Baker shells over them and I have thinner pl 400 mitts/ OR thin liners which I alternate depending on temps. I went with Dachsteins because they will be reliably warm even if they got wet. They are all business albeit kind of funny looking.

For my wife We have black rock gear down mitts and a black diamond shell. She has the same liners though. This is assuming she is going but often times she doesn’t when it’s colder out.

Ps http://www.sweatersintl.com where I got my Dachstein mitts from is currently having a 50% off storewide clearance. So the mits are dirt cheap at 28 bucks.

First question is why and how did the lobster claw mitts get wet? Second question is what insulation weight and shell type was in those lobster claw mitts

I also tend to get cold hands and feet, benefits of age and probably some frostnips along the journey.

The best I have come up with for hands are the BD Mercury Mitts as you listed, along with a very thin SmartWool liner glove inside the mitt’s fleece liner.  I also like the Seirus Heat Wave glove liners, a metalized liner that actually does seem to radiate some heat back.  These work to keep me skiing on the coldest of days (10 degrees or less), although I sometimes have to supplement with chemical hand warmers.

It will help your wife if her hands are already warm when she puts the mitts on.  Otherwise, she’s insulating an ice cube!  Just out of curiosity, has she been diagnosed with Reynaud’s?

Some folks I know have had good luck with some of the higher quality heated gloves and mitts, like those from Outdoor Research.  The biggest problem I see with using them is if you are totally dependent on a battery powered device to stay warm and that device fails or runs out of juice, you are SOL.  Hope she finds something that works.

Thanks for all of the suggestions.

The lobster claw mitts got wet from the inside out. She was wearing lightweight polypropylene gloves underneath which wet out pretty quickly. Next trial will be fleece gloves, maybe with a pocket for hand warmers.

I’m not sure what exactly the lobster claw mitts were. They were not meant for hiking but bicycling, where your hands tend to get pretty cold because they’re not moving at all and are in the wind from moving quite fast. I think they were Pearl Izumi filled with Primaloft.

We tried to do the superheating core thing yesterday lying on the couch when it was 50F or so in the apartment. We piled several blankets on everywhere except the feet. The feet just got warm socks and the heaviest blanket. Core was warm. Feet were still cold.

She does not have Raynaud’s.

That sounds weird because my experience of polypropylene gloves is the opposite in that they stay dry no matter what

Have you had an ultrasound looking for vascular constriction yet? Tried natural vascular expanders like celery and raw almonds or ointments containing capsaicin

Like Carlos (<span class=”profile-data”>@lamboy</span>) above, the best I’ve been able to come up with for extreme temps in Colorado is the OR Mt Baker shell + Dachstein liner mitts.  The Dachsteins work, but are heavy.

In an effort to lighten up, I just recently got a pair of RBH Design’s Vapor Mitt with Hybrid liner.  They weigh in at 9 oz per pair, compared to 16 oz for the Dachstein combo.  Coldest temps this season have only been in the teens, so have not been able to test the RBHs.  Looking forward to try out the VBL technology.

Carlos does point out a good deal on the Dachsteins at http://www.sweatersintl.com/.  Years ago, Dachstein supply was limited in the US, so I ended up going to NeedleSports in the UK and paid $50 for a pair of Dachstein mitts.

Reading the description of those mitts at REI I’m wondering if they were simply  too tight and I note that they have by design no insulation on the inner palm as this is contraindicated in a cycling glove. Gloves and mittens should [ like socks] not be a tight fit for cold conditions

“It will help your wife if her hands are already warm when she puts the mitts on.”

plus 1. When I would Nordic ski it would take me a half hour of strenuous skiing to begin to get my fingers thawed out, even wearing lobster gloves with wool liners. Then I started making sure that my hands were warm before I stepped out of the car to get my equipment ready and it helped. Unfortunately, you can’t lace boots etc, with gloves on so this wouldn’t always work perfectly but it did make a difference. The rest of my body has no issues when it’s cold out–only my fingers, because of circulation I guess. So really, protecting my hands from the outside cold may have been a bad strategy–it’s getting blood to my fingers that solves the issue.

Oh and a cup of hot tea just before going out helps too.

Super heating your core doesn’t help much if you’re laying around.