Note: this item was provided for review.
I’ve always been someone who prefers to wear gloves: for work, for warmth, for really any reason I can come up with. In my closet is a stack of gloves, and in the garage is another stack of gloves. It’s not something I write about often, but it would be surprising if I didn’t have a pair of gloves close by.
I am a bit embarrassed, being from the Pacific Northwest, I had never heard of Sullivan Glove Company, which has been hand-crafting gloves in Bend, OR since 1941. Thus, I quickly jumped to get a pair of their gloves to test out, and as luck would have it, I really put them through the paces for testing.
These are great gloves, and I am a big fan.
Materials
Sullivan offers a range of different hides you can select from, I went with American buffalo, which comes in between 4-5oz in thickness. Here is what the company says about the buffalo based glove:
Buffalo has a very textured grain that takes several uses to break in, but is worth the time for a hard wearing glove. Buffalo leather offers our highest abrasion resistance glove and forms to your hand as you break it in with limited stretch.
This variant I have is of their roper style which has been lined, and while they don’t specify the lining, it looks and feels like a fleece lining to me. A relatively thin/low-bulk fleece lining at that. The overall construction of the glove feels stout, and is well done.
Wear & Performance
As mentioned above, I got some really good testing in with these gloves. While we didn’t have any extreme snowfall during the testing period, they were my only gloves I took with me on a trip up to 10,000’+ for 5 days of adventures. There, I wore these gloves on several hikes, as well as around town, with the weather sitting somewhere in the 30-40°F range, and the windchill about 5-10°F lower than that.
The long and short of the performance: well above expectations.
Gloves are a decently complicated object to do well. There’s few brands that can make a glove which fits these characteristics well:
- Durable with protection of your hand.
- Warmth (warm or lack of warmth)
- Easy to pack or stow such that you don’t feel like they are obnoxious to carry.
- Comfortable to wear, as you don’t wear gloves you don’t find comfortable.
- Good dexterity: wide range here, but they should allow you to do what you need to do while wearing the gloves.
- Reasonable pricing: you won’t wear and use expensive gloves, because you’ll worry about damaging them. So gloves should strike a balance that you don’t fret about damaging them, and thus not using them, but that they are still good gloves.
So with those in mind, let’s talk about how these gloves stack up in each category. Here’s how the Buffalo Roper Lined gloves stack:
- Durability: I wore these eating shit on a too-powdery snow shoeing adventure and a few more times snow shoeing as well. They handled all the rough and tumble of man handling the shoes on and off, strapping them to my pack, and the ice and snow. They got fully soaked, and yet I see no marks or signs of damage on the gloves. Highest marks here.
- Warmth: I did not think these would be warm enough, if I am honest. A thin fleece lining usually is not. However, I suspect because of the thickness of the hide, the lining outperforms how it would in other gloves. My hands never were cold with these on, even when the cuffs of the lining was soaked with snow. In fact, I handed over the visibly soaked gloves to my wife to warm her hands up, and she too remarked how warm they were. Top notch.
- Packed Size: these gloves pack down well, but not astonishingly well. They are closer to what it would be like to pack a thick leather glove, than what it would be like to pack an insulated glove. They fit easily in my bags and jacket pockets, which made keeping them with me a trivial thing.
- Comfort: I am slightly between sizes with Sullivan, and I selected a medium. I think my hands would be swimming in a large, but the medium fits well enough that I think it is the correct size for me. I mention that because going up a size would gain some comfort, but decrease other attributes. I do, however, find these gloves pretty comfortable to wear. The seam on the pinky of my right hand does hit in an awkward spot, but it is easing with wear. I am excited to see how these are next season.
- Dexterity: I needed these gloves to operate zippers (with and without pulls), my camera, and the fasteners on my snow shoes. They did all of that with ease. I was surprised that I could easily operate the camera, and I think that’s because I have a medium in the gloves and not the large, so my fingers are not swimming inside the gloves. I never once felt the need to remove the gloves to take a picture. Grabbing the tiny zippers on my pants was tricky, but doable with a touch of concentration, but showed the limits of the dexterity for this lined glove. Still, impressive given the warmth.
- Pricing: these retail for $95, but keep in mind that they are cut and hand sewn to order, in the USA. Given that, I think the pricing is quite amazing for these. At just under $100 I would have no problem if I accidentally destroyed these, but I also suspect it’s going to be exceptionally hard to do that.
Essentially, these gloves impressed me across the board. They might not have been what I would have normally picked for this type of hiking, but needing something which could handle: hiking, shopping in the city, and potentially digging my car out of snow and mud — these are for sure the best gloves I own to handle all three of those tasks while the weather remains cool-cold.
Overall
American made, hand sewn and cut, and extremely durable. That’s what these are. That they are not twice the cost is impressive. These are going to come everywhere with me when I travel in the colder months, and certainly will not be my only pair from the brand.
I am a very big fan, and highly recommend checking them out.