Something I learned rather quickly after leaving the gray of the Pacific Northwest many years ago, was how transformative keeping the sun off your skin is, and how much that can help you stay cool. In order to achieve this for your head/face/neck/ears, you effectively have two options: hat or umbrella. Preparing to head to Japan in the dead-heat of summer, we geared up with sun protection gear, and I picked up Montbell’s Travel Sun Block Umbrella 50 for my wife to use.
By day three of the trip she had moved from her sun hat, to this sun umbrella and she never looked back. By day 12, I bought one for myself, as I was getting jealous with how well this umbrella works. This is primarily a sun umbrella, but Montbell does note it will shed rain (but I think this means don’t buy it for heavy sustained rain).
Materials & Specs
There’s a lot here to breakdown:
- UPF 50+ canopy, with 20-denier polyester (polyurethane coating, water repellent finish)
- Coated dark interior
- Resin-reinforced carbon fiber ribs
- 6-rib construction
- 2-step folding construction
- Tip loop for hang drying the umbrella
- Umbrella case
- Upper shaft: iron; Lower two shaft: aluminum
- Weight：4.6 oz / 130 g
- Size Guide：Opened diameter: 34.6 in / 88 cm | Rib length: 19.7 in / 50 cm | Extended shaft length: 19.7 in / 50 cm
- Folded length: 9.1 in / 23 cm
- Made in China
When folded, this umbrella is tiny and it weighs very little. So much so that I’ll gladly take this hiking. The trade off is coverage diameter, and the length of the shafts which means you’ll have to keep your arm up higher. The materials are quite nice overall.
In Use
I didn’t get to use mine a ton, but my wife used hers a lot. So some quick thoughts from me on this:
- It’s hard to explain how compact this is when folded and inside the case. It fits in my bags with ease, weighs nothing, and is so damned easy to carry that I never bothered taking it out of my bag.
- At the same time it’s large enough for one person to get full coverage, including their shoulders, from the sun.
- I was worried that this would be annoying to carry with how short the shaft is, but in practice I never found it annoying or troublesome.
- This is a little tricky to fold up and unfold for the first half dozen times. The ribs themselves fold upwards towards the tip, and then the shaft collapses down. You simply have to get used to the order and feel, and then it’s pretty quick.
- The first moment I tried using this, was on a long walk back in the dead of the afternoon, but the wind was just enough that it was impossible to use this. This umbrella catches a lot of wind very easily, and felt like I almost lost my grip a couple of times.
- There were three different types of sun umbrellas in our group, but this one provided much darker shade than any of them and was vastly more compact.
- One benefit of the smaller size is that it’s much easier to move through crowded areas with this than it would be with something larger.
- My wife’s umbrella did get what looked to be a tiny hole in it, but I actually think there was some kind of nick or scratch in the black coating. That was the only durability issue we encountered.
- We did get caught in a thunderstorm with pretty heavy rain, and I needed to venture out into the rain to pick up something from a store, I used this to keep dry and for the 30 minutes or so I was in the rain, there was no issue with keeping dry using this. A nice bonus.
I’m very happy with this. The little loop at the tip of the umbrella made it easy to hang dry once back at the hotel. The case keeps is very tidy and small in your bag as well. It’s very well designed and performs equally well.
Overall
I’m a fan, but I am not ready to say I am a convert to a sun umbrella over a sun hat. My wife and daughter are. And this is one of those items where I think I lucked out, in that I bought something so good, I have no desire to look for anything else. Either way, this is coming with me on hikes and trips from now on. Good stuff.
