OM Live From Berghaus In The Lakes!

On the left, normal down with water, note the utter hopeless collapse of the little down fronds. On the right, floaty hydrophobic Berghaus down, still lofting and insulating.

Ooops, the new Velum in horizontal, half-body action...

This is all you need to know about Bioflex 2 - by using it, you can save the cost of buying Mars bars every week.

Woot! New ad campaign filmed from a helicopter by that Alastair Lee fella on the right.

And finally, here's Leo. Dropped by chopper on top of a flippin' great peak with only a wingsuit to get him out of there.

High drama here as we're spending a couple of days in Langdale getting the inside scoop on what's new from Berghaus both for this autumn and next spring, plus a premiere preview of the TV advert at the centre of the new Berghaus £800,000 ad campaign - and yes, you read that right.

I'm not going to go into excruciating detail here, you'll get that later in the week and, to be honest, we've already covered a fair few of the new bits on the site and even used them.

Hydrophobic Down

There's the hydrophobic down, out this autumn for example - it's a new DWR-treated down which repels water for longer and recovers from getting wet faster than normal down while being just as warm and light and compressible. Berghaus is using it in two jackets, but the one most likely to be used in the UK is a hybrid with the down in the core section and Primaloft in the fringe bits which are most likely to get wet.

New Active Shell Jacket and Pants

Also new this autumn is the Velum - we've already carried a first look of this new Gore-Tex Active Shell jacket, but what Berghaus didn't really tell us before was that the shoulders use a tougher, Pro Shell-based fabric on the shoulders and other wear points. As far as we know, the only other brand doing that is Arc'teryx... So now you know. The matching pants use the same fabric on the knees and seat.

New Bioflex 2

For next spring 2012, the big news is Bioflex 2 - we told you all about that earlier as well, but the good news is that tomorrow we get to try it for real and, according to Berghaus, it's energy efficient enough to save 3.5 Mars Bars over a six-hour hike. Ooops, bad news for Mars Bar makers.

And That Big Ad Campaign...

Ah... hang on, I'll write about that somewhere else. But Leo Houlding filled us in on the making of the advert, a serious production in the Dolomites - see some behind the scenes stills from last week - then presented the first 60-second cut of the TV advert.

It's a stunner, mixing sports and athletes with footage filmed from helicopters and over the edge of massive faces and it should be on TV this October, so watch out for it...

More to come on all this stuff once we've escaped from our precarious situation sandwiched between a headwindy bike ride over Wrynose Pass and a sociable bar session with the Berghaus team.

More Pics Below... what is going on with those pants?