- Hey, what's up?
It's Tom from Pack Hacker comin at you
from my buddy, Francis' place, in beautiful,
sunny, San Francisco.
Actually, it's not sunny at all.
It's been raining for the past couple days,
which has been quite terrible, but seemingly normal.
Which gives us the perfect opportunity to take a look
at the Alpine Houdini from Patagonia.
Now you're gonna have to bear with me,
cause I'm a little bit sick, but the time is right
to do this review, so let's get into it.
(coughing)
(blowing nose)
Much better.
(upbeat music)
- Alright, so the first thing to take into account
when looking at this rain jacket
is that it's extremely light.
It is 6.8 ounces and it basically floats in the air.
(choir singing)
Wow.
So lets put the into perspective.
You could go into your refrigerator, grab a can of Diet Coke
drink half of it, and that would still be heavier
than this jacket right here.
So how does Patagonia keep this thing so light?
Well they cut off every zipper that you don't need.
They cut off any extra little wingdings,
any little zippers, logos, everything.
And they kinda just cut all that off,
and leave this thing super minimalistic
so you can get that light weight.
So when they do cut that stuff out,
there're actually only two zippers on this jacket.
One is to zip up the jacket itself, the two halves of it.
That's what's gonna keep you nice and dry
when those are connected.
And then there's another chest pocket which also doubles
as a stuff sack for the jacket itself.
So this is really great, you know,
you don't need your rain shawl all the time,
so when you're not using it, you know
just compress it down real tight
and then you have that just kinda sitting in the bottom
of your bag or somewhere kinda out of sight out of mind
until you need it again.
And it's really not gonna take up that much space.
It's four inches by seven inches by 2.5 inches,
so super compact and small.
When it's folded up the shape of it is kinds weird.
It's a triangle, you know, kind of a weird shape,
but maybe you know use it as a football at the beach
or something when you're not using it as a rain shawl.
I don't know, get creative.
So in addition to the two zippers,
there are two other accessories worth mentioning.
There's a little bungee cord that's gonna be in the back
of the hood that lets you tighten the hood up.
So if it's windy it kinda sticks on.
Also the hood is kinda floppy
and it can sorta get in your face.
But after you tighten up that bungee,
it's gonna be pretty great for you.
In addition to that, there's gonna be a little loop
on the jacket itself when it's in the compressed form.
So if you have a carabineer or some kind of other clip,
you can kind of clip this on, you know maybe on the outside
of your bag or something while you're not using it.
So there are two things that are a little bit weird
about this jacket.
The first one is that there are no pockets on the sides
of the jacket themselves.
So if you wanna keep your hands warm while it's raining out,
maybe it's a little bit cold, if you just generally like
putting your hands kind of in your pockets,
you're not gonna be able to do that with this thing.
Also, the hood is a little bit of a weird mechanism.
You always have to keep the bungee in the back tightened
otherwise that bill will kinda come down in front
of your face or the hood will blow off
from any type of wind.
Despite these couple negatives, we'd still recommend
the Alpine Houdini from Patagonia.
A lot of these decisions were made to keep the jacket
kind of compressible, small, and very minimal,
so we'd definitely still roll with this thing.
Now, if you'd like to purchase and learn more,
there's going to be a link below.
Whenever anybody clicks that and makes a purchase,
we do make a small commission, so it really helps support
what we do and lets us continue
to bring you good travel gear reviews.
So thanks for checking us out,
and we'll see you in the next video.
(beep)
(coughing)
(beep)
Tea. Tea. Tea.
(beep)
(hands slapping legs)
(beep)
Losing my voice.
(upbeat music)