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Baffin Mountain boots

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Baffin Mountain Boots Reviewed by Dawn Smith

Trail Testers Recommended 100%

Koolbox Web Page

SRP £269 Men’s and Womens sizes 6 - 12 Weight Size 11 - 1.17kg

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For the tests I wore Teko organic winter socks. These worked very well and I was impressed at the end of each day, how dry my socks and my feet were. The honeycomb inner footbed does a very good job of insulating your feet and even after an unintentional slip into the stream that I was crossing the boots kept my feet dry.

The vulcanised sole has tenacious grip on snow and ice, but pure ice they need extra bite. I first tried a pair of Petzl grippers and these worked well on road ways where the ice had become slick. Then I strapped on a pair of Grivel G12 Newmatic crampons and used the boots to negotiate a rather treacherous frozen stream. Whilst I would not use them for ice climbing, the Baffin boots proved themselves a competent all round performer in the hills.

The freeze lasted for three weeks and I wore the Baffin boots every day, which says something! If you like walking in the snow and want warm feet, look no further.

polyurethane mid-sole, polyurethane base and a waffle footbed insole.

So is it practical to wear these sort of boots in a UK winter?

The last lot of snow around Christmas dumped four feet of the white stuff on our doorstep and another couple of feet in the drifts. It was also bitterly cold with daily temperatures nudging minus 10C and night time temps hitting -17C.

Some days with windchill, the temperatures plummeted even further, so this was a great opportunity to put the Baffin boots through their paces.

I tested the boots walking in the snow covered hills behind the office, as I would have done with hiking boots. Snowshoeing, using the MSR Lightning Ascent Snowshoes and strapped on crampons to see how they would fare across ice.

Baffin advise you wear a size bigger than you would normally , so when I first took them out of the box they seemed huge!

Some folk have warm feet and others like myself suffer with cold feet. I get used to walking in snow, or skiing with my toes going numb. I start to worry about frostbite and toes dropping off, though so far they feel worse than they are in practice, this is not an issue with Baffin boots, where my toes stayed warm throughout, even negotiating deep snow on snowshoes.

The Baffin Mountain look the business and are warm and comfortable. The waffle footbed can be seen above and this insulates your feet and keeps them warm and dry. They also work very well with snowshoes.

The inner soles are a five layer composition of insulation which keep the feet warm and dry. The laces are long and offer fast and easy lacing.

The thing that I will remember most about the last weeks of Arctic weather up here in the Berwyn Mountains, was having warm comfortable feet every day for three weeks, thanks to the brilliant Baffin boots that I was testing.

Bafffin boots are imported from Canada to the UK, by Koolbox of Loughborough.

The boots that I had on test were the Mountain, a lace up boot designed to keep your feet warm and dry, even when the mercury hits -60C.

Incredibly Baffin also make an Extreme series of boot s that will keep your feet warm to a staggering -100C, making these boots essential items for anyone visiting the Arctic and Antarctic.

The Mountain that I tested comprises an inner and outer boot.

The inner boot is made of five insulation layers sandwiched together to keep your feet warm but also dry. The outside two layers are a silver material to reflect heat back to the foot and the hollow fibre wicks away the moisture, leaving the foot warm, but dry.

The outer boot outer boot comprises a Timberwolf leather upper, vulcanised rubber outsole,