Best Gloves For… | Gloves Buying Guide

If you want to find out even more about our gloves range, and what to look out for when buying your next pair, you can read our full in-depth Gloves Buying Guide, here.

If you’re looking for advice about the best gloves for a specific discipline, such as gloves for winter climbing and backcountry skiing, with temperature and location in mind, then we have put together our gloves guide below to help you choose the right pairs of gloves to suit your needs.

Gloves System and Finding What Works For You

In difficult conditions no one pair of gloves can cope all day long.

Consider your use throughout a typical day. Hard work on an approach demands thin gloves, and as the temperature drops you reach for your thicker gloves. Depending on conditions, these gloves may then get wet, so you replace them with another thick pair.

A pitch of very hard climbing makes a more dextrous pair necessary, and then at the top of the route less dexterity is required but maximum warmth, where a pair of mitts is best.

Over the day you have then used five pairs of gloves and mitts. In short, you can never have too many gloves.

Having a good gloves system can be key to a successful day out. Some people wear liner gloves underneath thicker gloves or mitts; others will change into over-mitts when belaying, sometimes with chemical heating pads or even battery-powered heat packs snuck inside; and others will stick with one pair of gloves until they are forced to switch to another pair. It’s often a case of trial-and-error to establish what works best for you. We don’t have a particular recommended glove system, except that it is better to change gloves before you absolutely must do, and better to have too many gloves with you than too few.

Summer Trekking Gloves

One thin pair of gloves is usually all you need unless at quite high altitudes. Touchscreen Gloves or Touchscreen Grip Gloves are perfect, perhaps with a pair of Mountain Gloves as a backup if the weather turns or if you are going quite high.

Recommended Gloves For Summer Trekking

Winter Mountaineering Gloves

Two or three pairs of gloves is best. A thin pair such as Touchscreen Gloves or better still a windproof pair like Terra Gloves are best for milder days or when you are working hard. Guide Gloves are superb thicker options and are the workhorse gloves of many instructors and guides, and Cirque Gloves are a great Soft Shell option which dry fast and work in all but the very wettest weathers. Sentinel Mitts are the perfect backup mitt. Some people like the simplicity and warmth that mitts provide, too.

Recommended Gloves For Winter Mountaineering

Backcountry Skiing Gloves

Thin windproof Soft Shell gloves like Tour Gloves are perfect for ski touring, however, if the weather is foul then a pair of thicker gloves such as Randonee Gloves are the ideal foil. Even if the thicker pair of gloves lives in your pack most of the time, the reassurance of a backup option is usually worth carrying.

Recommended Gloves For Backcountry Skiing

Winter Climbing Gloves

Most thin gloves such as those made from Powerstretch® or lightweight Soft Shell are suitable for the walk-in, but if post-holing through thick snow then consider slightly warmer options. Direkt Gloves are the perfect option for technical leads, and Super Couloir Gloves offer an excellent warmer but still highly dextrous option. Randonee Gauntlets are a firm favourite of many climbers as they dry fast and keeping working even if soaked through, and Sentinel Mitts or even the outer shell of a Citadel Mitt are a great belay or backup mitt.

Dave MacLeod has offered us some sound advice in a previous blog to help winter climbers everywhere to make an informed decision when it comes to glove choice.

Recommended Gloves For Winter Climbing

Alpine Climbing Gloves

G2 Alpine Gloves are ideal for Alpine climbing, being light, fast-drying and very dextrous. For colder conditions a pair of Couloir Gloves is a great addition, as they are relatively lightweight and offer great protection if the weather turns foul.

Recommended Gloves For Alpine Climbing

Polar Exploration & Expedition Gloves

It’s difficult to give glove recommendations for every type of expedition, but the bigger the mountain the bigger the gloves or mitts you need. However, few trips are cold throughout, and so a range of glove thicknesses is best, from very lightweight gloves like our Touchscreen Gloves to our very thickest mitts. Our modular Citadel Mitts are well-regarded for Polar conditions and expedition climbs alike, and our Redline Mitts have been to the top of Everest and many of the world’s other 8000 metre mountains and were used on the longest Polar journey in history: they are well-proven in the coldest places on earth.

Recommended Gloves For Expeditions & Polar Exploration