What's It For
The Temperance is a lightweight technical Pro Shell jacket that weighs a genuine 450 grammes for a medium. It's aimed squarely at climbers and mountaineers and uses what Berghaus claims is one of the few hoods designed to work properly with a climbing helmet.
The Techy Bits
Gore-Tex Pro Shell is a bit of a known quantity these days. Its woven backer makes it lighter than previous three-ply Gore-Tex fabrics, but the liner is also more abrasion resistant than the knitted back used with the old XCR fabrics and because it's slightly slick slides easily over inner layers.
Berghaus has taken things a stage further by using two Pro Shell fabrics for the Temperance. The main body is made from a lightweight rip-stop Nylon-faced fabric, while in high wear areas like shoulders and arms, a smooth but very tough plain weave Nylon with high abrasion resistance is used.
Pro Shell isn't fantastically breathable, though it's okay, but the two big chest pockets double as core vents to help keep things vented when the going gets hot.
Finally, like a couple of other Berghaus shells this year, the Temperance utlises the Raptor Hood, which is claimed to be large enough to easily accommodate a helmet and still give facial protection, while still being adjustable enough to cope a bare head for more general use and walk-ins.
How It Performed
First, the Temperance is genuinely light. Ours weighed just 450 grammes in a medium, which is feathery for a full-on mountaineering jacket, we can remember when similar shells would have tipped the scales at twice that.
Like other Extrem garments, it's cut slightly slimmer than Berghaus's more general kit, but there's still plenty of room for extra layers and it's nowhere near as scultped as, say, Arc'Teryx or Haglofs cut. It's also quite short at the front to work with a harness and is best teamed with shell or soft shell pants for maximum frontal protection.
The fabric is nice and unrestrictive, if a little rustly when new. Breathability is okay rather than great, but we found the easy to open core venting pockets did help when, say, hammering up climbs with a heavy pack. A lot of the detailing is well thought through, the simple accessory cord zip-pulls may not look flash but do the job with or without gloves and the cuff tabs have a non-hooked area at the end, so they're easy to use with a gloved hand.
All that's good, but what really marks the Temperance out is the excellent Raptor Hood. Put simply it's massive and that, together with easy to use adjustment cords and a cunning shape means it swallows a helmet easily while still allowing easy head movement and giving full facial protection. Far more than any other 'helmet- compatible' hood we've used.
There are plenty out there that only just take a full helmet and then don't cover your face or allow you to turn your head or look up easily. It's easily the best hood we've used with a helmet. That's part one sorted, the good news is that it's just as good without a helmet. The twin pulls at the back of the hood may look messy, but allow you to adjust the hood to grip your head and move with it while still being comfortable. A big peak with wired brim finishes things off and offers good protection and though at least one reviewer has had issues with it blowing back, it hasn't happened to us so far.
We like the venting pockets, though some will be suspicious of their water tightness in really wet conditions, most climbers though will be operating above the snowline where it's less crucial and we didn't experience any leak issues, though we did use the venting extensively.
What else? The 'DNA' reflective print on top of the hood is a love / hate, Marmite sort of thing. Should be good for spotting your mates from above on desperate nocturnal multi-abseil retreats, ahem...
Verdict
If you climb regularly in a helmet and want a hood to fit over the top of it, the Raptor Hood design is absolutely spot on. It's the only hood we've used recently that genuinely accommodates a climbing helmet without restricting either movement or protection. Pull it over, snug it up and you can cover virtually your entire face while still being able to look around or up. And it still works great with a bare head.
The rest of the jacket works fine too. It's light, has been durable so far and doesn't have any major drawbacks for its intended use. If your're more of a walker than a climber though, think carefully because the shortish cut at the front works best with shell pants and may not offer the frontal protection some walkers expect from more traditionally cut jackets.
Buy if a genuinely helmet-compatible list is high on your list of priorities.
