Surge Jacket – Performance

The Surge is designed as a dedicated mountain walking jacket with no helmet pretensions or alpine  affectations and it’s very, very good one. If you want a more mountaineering-orientated Montane jacket, have a look at the Alpine Pro instead.

The understated orange with colour-matched zips went down well as did the ‘soft but tough’ feel of the Gore-Tex C-KNIT fabric and its pleasant next to skin sensation. And it has a sleek, high quality feel generally that’s reassuring.

‘The hood on this adjusts at the back and at the sides, uses easily accessible adjusters, and is as beautifully fitted as the best wet-suit or ninja outfit’

The cut is a sort of happy medium: spacious enough to allow a warm mid-layer and with plenty of boob room, but not exaggeratedly tapered to the waist. And it fits fine over wider hips. That makes it slightly less flattering than, say, the Arc’teryx jacket or the Alpkit Balance, but functionally it’s not a big issue and it’s offers nice balance between having sufficient space for a warm fleece say and looking like a shapeless blob.

Hood’s Good…

What does work really well is the Surge’s excellent hood. It has close secure fit, adjusts easily to move with the head, has a wired stiffened peak for overhead protection and, blissfully, allows excellent peripheral vision – you don’t, for example, need to pull it down to safely cross a road.

Everyone loved that hood. And everything else just works. No restrictiveness. Easy to use adjusters on hem and cuffs. Handy glove-friendly zip-pulls. And two decent-sized hand-warmer pockets that sat above pack-belt level and are backed up with an internal phone-sized pocket.

If we were being fussy, we’d like to see the smoother-running moulded YKK VISLON zips at this price level, but the water-resistant ones fitted worked fine during the test, so maybe we’re just being fussy.

Surge Jacket – Verdict

A very nicely made, no-fuss, high quality mountain walking jacket that uses a cracking waterproof fabric. It scores extra bonus marks for having a really capable hood that mixes great fit, good vision and all-round protection.

All this and at just over 300 grammes for a size 12, it’s still light and packable enough to cart around when it’s not miserable and wet. The cut is arguably more function than fashion, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing and it fitted all our testers’ assorted shapes well.

The only downside is that the price-tag of £300 is at the top end of the market as we’d expect with a Gore-Tex jacket. But if that’s within your budget, the Montane Women’s Surge is an excellent all-round waterproof walking jacket.

More Information

See montane.co.uk