Back in November of 2016 I posted over on my facebook page about a kickstarter project for a Yak wool baselayer, from the company Peak to Plateau, called the ‘Kailash 1/4 Zip‘.
Being one of the few people in the long distance hiking community, it seems, that has really invested time and money into putting to the test Yak wool garments, it was hard for me to not back this project.
Earlier today the garment showed up. As anybody that has done kickstarter knows, any non-digital kickstarter that shows up, is a good thing, and at five months past the Kickstarter estimated date of delivery, that is something that does not bother me all that much. Small start up companies, trying to get all the cogs in order, working with products (in this case, yak wool) outside the normality, well, they deserve some leniency.
So to get into the specs of this garment…
The Kailash 1/4 Zip it is a 190 gsm, 18 micron, 65% Yak wool, 35% Tencel blend garment.
The tencel is Eucalyptus based, which is crazy soft to the skin.
I cannot speak to the performance of this garment, it just showed up. The purpose of this post is to be a placeholder for future updates and to show some initial photographs. As I get some time wearing the garment I will post updates.
Peak To Plateau owner, Stefan, posted the follow interesting bit over on the current Massdrop drop for this garment:
The anti-bacterial properties in merino and yak (and many other natural animal fibres) are all very similar as far as I know. There will be slight differences due to the different chemical and physical nature of the fibres, but the yak has worked just as well as any merino for us so far. Also Tencel has very good anti-bacterial properties (much, much better than any synthetic and significantly better than cotton).
We have done lab testing on this fabric to compare it to Icebreaker fabrics and the results are quite encouraging (although we prefer to judge the warmth on field testing not lab testing, as that is what really counts). The thermal resistance on our fabric was 0.038 Celsius.M2/W.The Icebreaker fabric 200gsm 100% merino is around 0.035 Celsius.M2/W, and the Icebreaker 260gsm 100% merino is 0.040 Celsius.M2/W.
Considering our fabric contains 35% Tencel which helps a lot with the durability and feeling, we were very pleased with the results and believe it shows what yak is capable of.
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