This whole article is kind of a straw man anyway.
Warmth of clothing isn't actually what people care about. What people care about, and what the article does not mention, is warmth per unit weight.
Warmth of clothing isn't actually what people care about. What people care about, and what the article does not mention, is warmth per unit weight.
> the gear of the past is capable, but it has a narrower operating window. If you stop moving in Mallory’s kit at 8,000 meters, you will freeze quickly. Modern gear buys you a safety margin if you become static.
In modern terms, this means that stopping to take a photo — whether Ansel or selfie — would carry a material risk of harm in the classic gear that is addressed by modern gear. The example of a selfie is perhaps too easily dismissed unconsidered, but the cognitive load is real for casual hikers, and is a benefit to modern gear that deserves the mention it gets. If I had to choose between a cap that has perfect heat management and a cap that weighs 10g less but requires me to constantly take it off and put it on every five minutes to allow evaporation, I would choose the heavier and lower annoyance cap. Each person’s preferences and skills apply; if one seeks to minmax weight/thermal then that’s a negligible price to pay to improve — but only some truly do strive for the limit of lowest mass without regards to complexity.
There was an enviro-scifi book from the eighties that noted that a few people will pursue ‘one piece of apparel serves all functions’ skinsuit to the exclusion of all other concerns (such as natural fabrics or apparel design), at which point we would plausibly expect to see at one extreme the folks who make a discount-ultralight vented bodysuit out of FedEx envelopes. I am taking for granted that someone has tried this, because of course someone has tried this! And that starts to verge on why, in a different enviro-scifi book of that same relative era, the stillsuit existed: the lightest way to have convenient purified water in an absurd climates. Even the stillsuit as we see it described prioritizes convenience, the sip tube, over a more efficient system that doesn’t expend calories on pumping water up. That’s purely because human beings have a cognitive annoyance limit; and we do variably prioritize convenience when assessing the weight-complexity tradeoff.
Add up the numbers in the bar graph and you'll see that the old gear sums to two kilograms heavier than the modern gear.
Anyway, you can try it yourself, wear a 2kg wax cotton jacket versus a 500gm technical jacket and see how you feel after a day's hiking.
Two kilograms extra is gigantic.
If you have a friend who hikes or backpacks, ask them to take you along for your first time and try it out for yourself.
Carrying your lunch on a 10-foot pole, keeping it off the ground at all times, versus slipping it into a fanny pack - or eating it and carrying it in your very center of mass.
I noticed while ultralight hiking (full kit without food, fuel, and water under 9 lbs, for multi-day excursions) that how close your backpack was to your back mattered. Unfortunately, if it was tight to your back it overheated you, so a standoff of an inch or so was essential. I considered dividing it front and back, so each was about half as "thick" (far from my body), but there isn't a lot you can carry in front of you without seriously impeding movement.
Anyway: force times distance equals work.
Considering that someone carrying 2 extra kilos will also be generating more body heat etc, the focus on heat over the rest of the article is in question.
2 big new innovations that matter are Gore-tex and Nylon fabrics that are very durable and wind resistance for their weight.