Here’s one of all of you outdoor tech geeks. Patagonia have just released, in special edition quantities, a new ‘Encapsil’ Down Belay Parka jacket which features water repellent down with a whopping 1000-fill power. Traditional down, which relies on trapping a layer of air for insulation becomes useless when wet and water repellency helps to solve that issue. That technology in itself has been around for a little while but it’s the 1000-fill power down that’s the really neat innovation here…

1000-fill power is pretty much a world first in the world of down and makes the jacket exceptionally warm compared to how light it is. The manufacturers use safe, silicone-based chemistry, (free of nasty fluorocarbons) and pass the down through a machine that agitates it with low-level radio frequency waves until the surface of its molecular structure begins to shift. They then deposit a tiny amount of siloxane onto each plumule of down resulting in a permanently hydrophobic fibre that is stronger and loftier by 25%. Pretty freakin’ geeky huh?

Sure, it’s not gonna appeal to park riders and is likely to be overkill for anyone not in extreme climatic conditions, but people looking to go on splitboarding missions ala Jeremy Jones or spend serious amounts of time camping in the mountains would be doing well to pick up one of these.

If you can afford the £600 price tag of course…