Mountain Equipment Janak – The Tech

Mountain Equipment uses several different versions of the tough, light and breathable Gore-Tex Pro fabric on different jackets. The excellent Lhotse – winner of our 2016 Best Waterproof Jackets review has a mix of lightweight 40-denier fabric for most of the jacket with tougher, slightly heavier 80-denier Pro on the shoulders and hips.

The Janak ups the game by using the tougher 80D fabric throughout, same as the tough ME Tupilak climbing jacket. You’d think that would increase the weight of the jacket, but the Janak is actually around 50g lighter than the Lhotse – 470g versus 520g.

Tougher And Lighter?

How come? It has fewer pockets basically and loses the tab-down hood facility. Otherwise it’s a very similar jacket with the same great Mountain HC Hood, plus the excellent Swiss-developed ME ‘Alpine Fit’. If you want more room in your shell, look for the versions with ‘Mountain Fit’.

Finally, like all ME’s shell jackets, the Janak uses the brand’s ‘Storm Construction’, which optimises seaming and minimises exposed stitching which could be vulnerable to abrasion.

Mountain Equipment Janak – Performance

The first time we pulled on the Janak, it felt like an old friend and we still reckon the ME Alpine Fit is one of the best cuts out there. The brand worked with expert Swiss designers to get it just right and the result is a jacket that’s beautifully closely fitted, but impressively unrestrictive at the same time. It’s athletic, neat and – for us at least – just feels absolutely ‘right’.

Hoods You Win

The same’s true of the excellent hood. It does a great job of fitting a non-helmeted head, gives plenty of facial protection and has a proper, fully-stiffened hood for extra reassurance when the rain comes sheeting down. Plenty of chin room too and it moves reliably with your direction of gaze.

It’ll work with a helmet too – not as well as ME’s huge Super Alpine HC hood, but the pay-off is that it does a good job without a helmet, something that’s marginal with the Super Alpine hood. Bottom line is that when you’re hunkered down inside the jacket, it feels properly reassuringly protective.

The fabric is a little noisy, particularly when the hood’s up, but breathes decently and has a pleasant, solid feel to it. If you do get a little sweaty hoofing it up some monster approach slope, ME has thoughtfully provided neatly engineered pit-zips for added venting. The zips are double-ended, so you can tweak the opening to suit your preferences.

A Question Of Pockets

The jacket’s achilles heel, if you’re a pocket fiend, is its relative lack of the things. There are two great big, harness and pack-belt friendly hand pockets, but that’s it. No chest pockets inside or out.

We didn’t have an issue with that, but if you are someone who prefers to carry a phone in a separate pocket for example, you might be better off with a Lhotse, which has two additional pockets.

Otherwise everything just works: glove-friendly zip-pulls are present and correct, hem adjusts neatly, cuffs work well with and without gloves. If we were being really fussy, we’d observes that the hood adjusters don’t work as neatly as posh Cohaesive ones, but they do the job just fine.