What Pioneer Camp makes, and who it is for

Pioneer Camp has made outdoor clothing since 1999, and the range is built around layers rather than seasons. That sounds like a slogan until you stand at a car park at eight in the morning in April and have to choose. The layer against your skin either moves sweat off you or keeps the sun off. The layer over it holds heat: fleece when the day is dry, down when you need warmth you can pack into a stuff sack, synthetic fill when you expect to get wet. The layer over that is for weather: a taped shell for rain, a softshell for wind, a ski jacket for a day that ends on a lift. Then the trousers, the shirts and the socks the rest of it goes over.

What we make

The insulated shelf is the one people arrive on: puffers and long parkas, goose and duck down at fill powers from the mid six hundreds up, and synthetic and PrimaLoft fills for the days when getting damp is likelier than getting cold. Fleece is the shelf they come back to: polar fleece jackets, grid fleece cut thin enough to go under a shell, sherpa layers that read as coats, half-zips you open at the top of a climb. The shells are rain jackets with taped seams, softshells with a fleece backing, and windbreakers that fold into their own pocket. The snow shelf is ski and snowboard jackets, several of them three-in-one with a zip-out liner, and snow trousers and bibs with cuffs cut over the boot. Sun protection is hoodies, shirts and rash guards rated UPF 50 and above. Then vests, shirts and tees in bamboo, merino and quick-dry knits, trousers and shorts by the inch, and the socks, caps, gaiters and gloves that decide more days than any of the above.

The number on the card is the second idea. Fill power is the loft of the down, printed as the data gives it, and read next to how much jacket there is rather than on its own. Grams per square metre is the weight of a fleece, and it is the only figure that separates two fleeces that look the same in a photograph. A seam is called taped where it is taped. An inseam is measured on the garment. A UPF figure describes dry, unstretched cloth and drops when the cloth is soaked, and the page that prints it says so and names the source.

Who it is for

You, if the day is outdoors and the weather has a vote in it. The two mistakes this catalogue is arranged to prevent are buying warmth by the photograph and buying a size by the label in your jeans. Take a chest measurement over the shirt you will actually wear and a waist measurement where trousers sit, decide what is going underneath before you pick a letter, and the shelves turn into a filter. An outer layer that has to swallow a fleece wants the larger of two letters; a mid layer that should sit close under a shell wants the smaller.

Most of the range is cut from XS to 3XL, with the snow kit from S to 2XL, and both men's and women's cuts run through every shelf rather than sitting in a corner of it. Prices run from under ten dollars for a tee to the high two hundreds for a long down parka. The middle of the catalogue, meaning the fleece, the shells and the trousers, sits between forty and a hundred, and that is where most people start.

What we will and will not say

A card describes a garment: what it is filled with, how heavy the cloth is, where the pockets are and which ones zip, whether the hood comes off, what the label says about sun. What it does for you on a ridge at four in the afternoon is yours to judge, and the pages leave it to you. You will not find a temperature rating anywhere on this site, because comfort depends on the wind and on whether you are moving, and a number printed against a jacket would be a guess made on your behalf. Where a page touches a rule or a body of public advice, meaning fibre labelling, care labelling, what a UPF figure means or what wind does to cold, it is written under a named source, read on the date printed beside it, and the figure is explained where it stops rather than rounded up.

The one verifiable thing we say about ourselves is the year, 1999. Everything else you might want to know about a piece is on its card, and how the figures on those cards are kept current is set out on how we update the catalogue.