Review: Patagonia Stormstride Jacket
What we liked
Slim fit
Lightweight at only 580g
What we didn’t
Pockets
Fiddly vent zips
The Verdict
THE SHORT READ…
An excellent jacket that allows great movement while still feeling slim in the fit and without a crazy price point. Although the extra large pocket openings, while perfect for using with gloved hands, aren’t deep enough to stop stuff falling out.
THE LONG READ …
The Patagonia Stormstride Jacket has a build quality that you’d expect from the Patagonia brand. Its design is well thought out with touring in mind and it’ll last you many a season, especially if you look after it.
The shells fabric is a Stretchy, 3-layer H2No™ which is waterproof and breathable, it doesn’t have a massive stretch to it but enough to allow good movement. It’s treated with a durable water repellent (DWR) finish; the fabric, membrane and DWR finish are made without intentionally (whatever that means?) added PFAS.
The large hood has a good adjuster cord at the back of your head, and two cords at the front that pull it snug around your chin, both have stitched in release buttons, that actually work rather well. It also has a wired peak that helps keep it firmly in place even when all the cords are pulled tight around your head or helmet.
The main zip is nice and chunky with an added thin cord - which could be a bit bigger to make it easy to use with gloves on.
The cuffs have a good adjustable piece of velcro, which I personally like, as it’s easy to then close the sleeves over your gloves, or tuck into a larger mitten.
The two external chest pockets are massive and offer up lots of space, you could stuff a skin in each one without too much trouble, but I don’t like the way the zip is only a couple of inches off the bottom of the pocket, allowing for larger objects to easily fall out if you open the pockets fully, such as your phone, but I guess that’s not a problem if you don’t fully open the pocket.
There’s one zipped internal pocket, which snuffles up a 7 inch screen phone with ease, and an open stuff pocket, that could take a set of skins to keep the glue warm between laps, but not really deep enough to store a set of splitboard skins securely, unless the jacket’s zipped up nice and tight to your torso.
The small powder skirt , that they call a ‘Low-Profile Powder Gasket’ actually works a lot better than it looks like it should, as the jacket has a good length to it, and the two elasticated hem cords work really well, and are easily released again when you want a more relaxed fit. As you’d expect, they fit and work perfectly with the Patagonia Stormstride Pants, overlapping nicely.
I’m not a great fan of the under arm vent zips, they do open a really good sized hole when you get too hot and they open both ways, having two zippers, but if you have both zips at the bottom, halfway down your torso, it’s very difficult to open them, as when you lift your arm in the air and you pull on the zip with your spare hand the bottom of the jacket simply lifts up and the zip doesn’t budge. You can solve this by always having the zips closed halfway down your arm, so you can lift your arm up and pinch the sleeve cuff holding it in place when pulling the zip down, but you then encounter the same problem of the hem rising up when you try to close the vent.
SUMMARY…
A top touring shell for when you want quality without having to remortgage the house, but still in the higher price bracket of scaled-back touring jackets.