doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Good winter hat for outdoors and hunting?

Kromer’s have several elevations of flap.
The deepest flap is accessed when you untie the bow.
Meaning the flaps cover the greatest percentage of the ears and neck.

Tied, the flaps only cover 1/2 the ear, untied, most of them.

They are very warm, well fitting, and nostalgic.
I like them more than my wool lined Filson waterfowlers cap.
Though both are very warm.

All of my rich tweedy shooting buddies had Barbour jackets. I couldn't see spending that kind of money. I worked for a Barbour retailer for a while. We took in Barbour products for retreating and repair. A customer gave us a jacket to send back for repair. Months went by, and you know the drill, they lost it. They sent him a brand new jacket and an apology. A while later, they found the customer's jacket and mailed it to us. I appropriated the beautiful repaired jacket, and a couple of decades later, I'm still wearing it. No fuss, no muss.

I got one from an ad in Gun Dog magazine, advertised as close outs, They were priced around a third of what they normally went for. When it arrived, the first thing I noticed was the label had been unceremoniously cut out of the coat. It came with a tin of wax that I have never used, and the hood was in the pocket. I didn’t figure the label was worth 2/3rds of the full retail price of the coat, and was fine with that.
If it is raining or damp, it is a great coat. If it is raining, and cold, you are SOL. I used it for years with a Filson waxed cotton Crusher hat, and learned the lesson a few times that it had almost no insulating effect should the temp drop during rain, and that happens frequently in my world.
It doesn’t actually get used all that much, as raining and not cold translates to early season, with leaves, bugs, sweat, and ticks in my part of the world. I haven’t been out on an opening day of bird season in decades, preferring to wait until we’ve had a frost or two.

I can see where a guy two or three states south of me would absolutely love it.



Best,
Ted

I have not had much luck with waxed cotton. The filson stuff is hot and sweaty. But their hats and their chaps. But the chaps will turn briars and any very light dew but not for long.

I invested in a very expensive Orvis hunting coat that was waxed. Besides being ridiculously heavy it was stiff in the cold and hot in mild temps. Worst of all, water vapor condensed on the inside and left me dripping wet in a day's worth of pheasant hunting. It was okay for around town but not much else. The Barbour products must be much different to generate all the appeal. But I stick with unwaxed cotton until conditions warrant switching to synthetics. There is a plethora of really improved clothes and boots, especially, that have been created by the hunting industry in the last 15-20 yrs that really are superior in my opinion. Some of it is even noncamo.

I remember years ago when I was younger, I would start saving my bread bags about September for hunting season. We didn't have many pheasants, but there were a lot of rabbits and occasionally a quail on the surrounding farms. When the weather got down into the 20s and 30s, I would go hunting. I would put on a pair of socks, then slide a bread bag on over each foot and then another sock over the top of them so that the bread bag was between each layer of socks. If it was really cold out, I would take a garbage bag and cut holes in it so I could slide my arms and head through the holes. I would put the bag over my chest in between two sweatshirts. Then I would put on my canvas type hunting jacket over the top of them. I wore a pair of sweatpants under my oversized jeans. And I would take a plastic grocery sized plastic bag and cut it to shape my head so that it covered my ears and was hidden by my stocking cap. I wore tall rubber boots which came up almost to my knees. I never got cold kicking through the snow for rabbits. Sometimes I would dine on the 2 or 3 hard boiled eggs and the bottle of water I carried with me. When I got home from hunting and took my clothes off, my inner pair of socks would be soaking wet with sweat. As would be my chest and my head. With the exception of my face getting a little wind burn, I don't ever remember getting cold in the winter when I went hunting and it was really cold outside.

I use several hats for winter hunting, but for most average fall/winter weather, I prefer to simply wear a wool or wool blend New Era ball cap style hat in fluorescent orange, red, or camo... depending on the season. Then I can use the size adjusting band to permit me to add or remove layers, depending on my activity level, or as the weather conditions change during the day. Most often, if I need a little extra warmth or wish to keep the cold wind off my ears, I add a thin hard-hat liner that I have dyed green. It breaks the wind, but doesn't muffle any sound to speak of. I use a wool Belgian Military balaclava under my outer hat if it gets even colder, and I can also use both the balaclava and the hard-hat liner for even more warmth. Or I can use other combinations such as quilted hard-hat liners or a merino wool stocking cap. If that isn't enough when it's really cold while on stand in our January flintlock season, I can cover any or all of the above with the hood on my heavier hunting coats.

I don't like the idea of any hat that will be too warm. It takes only seconds to adjust to different temperatures or activity levels, by simply adding or removing layers. JimmyW's story about layering up with feet and body parts covered in plastic bags is the very last thing I'd want to do. I'm glad he admitted that his inner layers got drenched in sweat. Anyone who has ever experienced hypothermia after sweating and getting overheated would never take such advice. My worst case of hypothermia happened after attempting to track a deer too fast because the weather abruptly changed, and blowing snow was quickly covering the tracks. Sorry to say, that was the only deer I ever lost, but I eventually had to give up after tracks and blood were totally covered. By then, I was pretty sweated up. I stopped to eat a sandwich, and the shivering started. Then it gradually got worse and became full-on blizzard conditions. The Weather forecast was very wrong that day, and when I finally got back to my vehicle, I was so frozen and shivering uncontrollably that it took a good 10 minutes just to get my keys out of my pocket. Then my fingers barely worked to unlock the door and start the engine. To make matters worse, the diesel engine produced very little heat until you got on the road and put a load on it, and I had to slowly drive with the window down until the defroster began to thaw the windshield.

Yesterday started out breezy, clear, and cold at 10° F, but by 3:00 pm it was sunny and a balmy 37° F, so the hard-hat liner helped a lot on stand in the AM. It took seconds to remove it and stuff it in my coat pocket when I decided to move to another spot. My hat got pulled off, or nearly so, several times while moving through thick areas of hawthorn, blackberries, or multiflora rose, and I don't think the presence of buttons or flap tie strings would have changed things a bit. That's just part of hunting in brushy places.

I thought of the following statement from the Nutty Professor at one point yesterday, when I hit the brim of my hat with the eye cups on my binoculars.


In my entire life, I have never seen or heard of any shooter who cut the brim off his hat because it kept him from getting his head down on the gun stock. If that happened to me, or most any normal shooter, the normal intelligent response would be to simply reposition the hat. That is also what I did when I bumped my binoculars into my hat brim yesterday. I did not feel compelled to cut off half of the hat brim. Oh, I also chuckled a bit too... thinking about an absurd response to a simple dilemma.

I remember that I got the same results to my early days of hunting, years later when I was in school in the military in the Florida Keys. And later in San Diego where the ocean water would get down into the 40s during the winter months. When I would go diving, the water between my wet suit and my skin would become a comfortable insulator and keep me warm in the cold water. Some people think that a wet suit keeps you dry, but it doesn't. The water gets between the wet suit and your skin and becomes an insulator that keeps you comfortable. Maybe that is where I got the idea back when I was a kid. I really don't remember.

Not all of them,Jim. Wetsuits are exactly that, but the drysuit was invented as far back as 1837 for keeping you warm AND dry. There is no need to be wet while staying warm anymore while diving, if you're willing to pay the price for a good drysuit.

https://www.divedui.com

You must have missed the part where I said that it was when I was back when I was in the military. And like I said, that was decades ago. I was probably making about $7.00 a week, so there were more important things to spend my money on than a drysuit. Cigarettes were a whopping $1.10 a carton on base back then. So, $2.20 was spent automatically every payday, which was every two weeks. Yep, $14.00 a payday. 😄 I remember someone gave me all of their diving gear because they were being transferred out. None of us wore dry suits back then, but either way you are still using the rubber effect to keep you warm and you still sweat under a dry suit....... I used the plastic on my feet up until a few years ago when I would shovel snow in the driveway or work outside in the extreme cold. And after doing that all my life, I never had any ill effects. But since it has gotten so warm recently here in the winters, I haven't had to shovel snow in the past three years. Actually, at the moment, I have my yard tractor on the battery charger- getting ready to mulch leaves. And here it is- almost Christmas. I remember when I was a kid living here, snow would start about Thanksgiving time and we would have snow on the ground- maybe up to 6-8 inches almost all winter. But now I can get through the winter with a heavy flannel shirt for a coat most of the time. And we usually get an inch or two of snow at the most. That's nice for the Indiana/Ohio area........ They said on the weather report today it's not considered a white Christmas unless there is at least a solid inch of snow on the ground and we aren't supposed to have one. We've only had two in the past decade or so.........Anyway, the fields nearby where I used to hunt are now all subdivisions. But one thing is for sure- the memories of me hunting when I was a kid are still good. 👍Take care.

Kids hunted railroad right of ways, when I was a kid, if they had no other place to hunt. I was lucky in that I grew up on a large farm and had many other farms available to hunt in my family. I could walk out the house and hunt in any direction, several miles in two directions. The world was a great place as a kid, if you had 10 .22 LR bullets, or six 12 gauge shells in your pocket and a dog for company. That was half a day put to good use. I knew ever detail of the land around me like the back of my hand. The youth today has no idea what they are missing.