Mountain Equipment Lhotse Jacket – Performance

The Lhotse is a brilliant all-round balance of super solidly-engineered construction, an excellent, tough and breathable fabric, as many features as you’ll ever need for general mountain use, an excellent, protective UK-friendly hood and a sublimely fitted cut.

ME’s alpine fit is still our favourite jacket cut on the market. It was developed over a two-year project with Swiss pattern-cutting gurus and, if you’re athletically built, it’s a superb mix of close fit and lack of restriction.

Swiss Fit Or Miss

We sometimes forget just how good it actually is. Note that if you’re carrying a little extra timber, ME’s Mountain Cut – used for the iconic Changabang jacket – gives extra volume without being a shapeless bag.

Otherwise the jacket is hard to fault. The Gore-Tex Pro fabric is a little noisy, something you notice particularly with the hood up for an hour or two, but feels reassuringly sturdy and tough and is decently breathable.

Happy In The Hood

The Mountain HC hood is a great all-rounder particularly with a bare or beanied head. Good fit, plenty of face protection and a cracking, stiffened and wired peak. It will take a helmet too, but the pay-off is less facial protection.  Cue either a balaclava or one of ME’s more specialised jackets like the Tupilak, which have a superb helmet hood, but struggle not to flop around on a bare head.

Zip-pulls and adjusters all work flawlessly with gloved hands. We like the flat, round easy-to-press hood and hem cord-grips in particular, the next best thing to the excellent Cohaesive grips.

Rocking Pockets

No shortage of pockets here. There’s a huge chest one on the left, think a sort of contemporary map-pocket – that’s super easy to use even with a pack on. It’s backed up by a pair of only slightly smaller ‘hand-pockets’. All of them get smooth-flowing YKK Vislon zips backed up with storm-flaps with integral drains.