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North Star Down Jacket from Montane

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Montane North Star Down Jacket Review by Dawn Smith

Trail Testers Recommended 100%

Montane Web Page

SRP £180 Men’s and Womens sizes XS - XL

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The North Star Down Jacket from Montane, is ideal as a year round mountain jacket for Alpine ascents, ski touring and winter hill walking.

The jacket is filled with 200g of best quality Ukranian 800+ Fill Goose Down, which is encased in a highly water resistant and windproof shell made of Freeflow®Ultra-light material.

It is light weight coming in at just 525g and compresses into its supplied stuff sack, making a small soft bundle about the size of a bag of sugar, that easily fits into your pack and is available in men’s and women’s sizes in black, red, blue and purple.

Although the jacket is very warm it is not bulky, so you can easily wear it as a layer under a hard shell and still have plenty of movement, making it ideal for climbing.

I have tested the jacket in the Norwegian

winter in temperatures below -20 and winter hill walking in North Wales and found it to be very good indeed.

When snow shoeing, you can get rather warm with all the exertion and when you stop for a brew you really start to notice how cold it is. No worries, just take the North Star out of its stuff sack, fluff it up and you really appreciate the warmth as soon as you put it on.

This jacket is a serious mountain jacket and has been well designed, well made and incorporates a number of good features.

The down hood, see photo at left, has a wired peak. It can be zipped up and snugged down with the non-whip adjusters to keep the weather out, but as you rotate your head you still have good vision.

There is a velcro volume adjuster at the back and the hood can be rolled away and secured with a wide velcro strip.

There are two generous hand warmer pockets with reverse zips, big enough to stow your winter gloves in. The elasticated cuffs

The non-whip hood adjusters can be used with winter gloves on.

The jacket has an excellent down hood with wired peak and reflectors on the back of the hood and on the cuffs.

The wired down hood has a velcro volume adjuster and can easily be rolled away and held in place with a wide velcro strap. (Below)

also have velcro to keep them securely closed. All the zips and adjusters are easy to work when wearing winter gloves and the front double zipper has a baffle to keep the cold out.

There is a generous zipped inside chest pocket, which can be accessed when the main zipper is closed and this is large enough for a small video camera, or gps and is guaranteed to keep the batteries warm.

On the cuffs and the back of the hood are small reflectors which really catch the beam of a head torch, as shown in the photo above. The Freeflow®Ultra-light material is very soft and comfortable to wear and the jacket made a great pillow filler inside a dry bag in the tent.

At one point I used a compression sack to further compress the jacket, when there was little space left in my pack. Even compressed right down like this, it performed really well.

This is an excellent jacket, well designed, well made and in my opinion well worth the money!