Harmonization of Layers

I began playing piano when I was 2 or 3 (I don't really recall what prompted it given I was that young, but my parents recalled that I had an affinity banging on our electronic keyboard with my hands and feet). By six I was competing in classical performances. My teacher, Sally Rehfeldt, had the patience needed for such energetic, difficult students such as yours truly. I was all about speed; my impulse was, invariably, to rush.

This caused a particular difficulty. Classical piano needs you to control a number of separate things at the same time. The right hand plays the melody, the left hand the bass and harmony, your foot the sustain pedal. Then there’s dynamics – knowing when to play loudly, when quietly, when to allow a section to breathe. They aren’t things you do one after another, but all at once; and if one element gets out of sync, the whole work suffers.

I tended to focus too much on the right hand. I’d seize the melody, push the speed, and my left hand would become imprecise. I’d keep the sustain pedal pressed too long, making the sound unclear, simply because I was so busy with the melody that I’d forget the pedal was even there. Sally would halt me, have me play the left hand on its own, slowly, until I could sense the structure underneath. Only then would she let me try both hands together.

I grasped this about music in my teens. It took nearly ten more years to understand the same principle applied to getting ready to go outside.

In April 2019, my friend Sayed and I drove to the Olympic Peninsula. Sayed is one of my good buddies from UCLA, and this was part of a larger trip around the Pacific Northwest. We were fairly new to being outdoors – keen, certainly, but not yet knowledgeable. This is when you end up making amusing errors.

The day before, we’d been at Mt. Rainier, where the weather was what you’d expect from an early spring, glaciated volcano: cold, wet, overcast. We’d dressed to suit, putting on lots of layers, and it worked – we were comfortable. This would prove important.

Olympic National Park is, in a way, three parks within the limits of one. Covering almost a million acres on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, it has glacier-topped mountain ranges, seventy-three miles of rugged Pacific shore, and, on its western sides, some of the largest temperate rainforests in the country. The Hoh Rainforest, where Sayed and I were going, gets an average of 140 inches of rain a year – twelve feet. Sitka spruce and western hemlock grow to 300 feet tall, their branches covered in hanging ropes of spiky moss. The forest floor is a thick covering of ferns and lichen. Banana slugs, bright yellow and as long as a cigar, move slowly across the moss-covered fallen wood.

The important thing is the rain. We’d been in the cold at Rainier the day before. We knew Olympic’s reputation. So that morning I dressed for what I thought to expect: a polyester base, a fleece middle layer, a Patagonia down jacket, and a rain jacket in my pack. Four layers, prepared for whatever the Hoh might offer. Dressed for fortissimo.

The Hoh, that day, was playing pianissimo. A rare sunny morning in the low 70s. No rain. No fog. The sun shone through the trees in gold beams, lighting the moss curtains hanging from the big leaf maples. The Hall of Mosses path went through ancient growth so dense and green that the air itself seemed colored. In different conditions, it would have been beautiful. But with four layers on, and the sun heating the trees into a humid greenhouse, it was stifling.

Within fifteen minutes I was soaked – but not by rain, by sweat. My polyester base had become a sticky, smelly second skin. The fleece on top of it was trapping that moisture. The down jacket over that was sealing it all in, like a greenhouse. Each layer I’d added for protection was working against me. I stopped, took off the jacket and fleece, and stood on the path in a wet polyester shirt that smelled like it had been in a hot yoga class, trying to cool down in a forest that averages 55 degrees and feeling foolish.

This is a typical mistake, and a surprisingly serious one. You aren’t likely to die of overheating on a path in the Hoh. But the idea behind it – adding lots of protection and not changing when the conditions aren’t what you predicted – is the same idea that causes real problems in more dangerous situations. It’s holding the sustain pedal down all the time: every note runs into every other note, and what should be music turns into noise.

Your body is a machine that produces heat. Even when resting, you create thermal energy. When you hike, you create a lot more. That heat has to go somewhere. In a good layering system, it goes out slowly, controlled by materials that handle the movement of warmth and moisture. In a bad system – or an overdone one – the heat builds up. You sweat. And now you’re wet. Being wet is where trouble begins. Water pulls heat from your body about twenty-five times quicker than air does. The hiker who puts on too many clothes to avoid getting chilled will then sweat, and their soaked clothing will take heat away from them much better than cold air could on its own. That person – the one who layered up to get warm – has actually made themselves colder than they’d be with fewer, more sensible layers. In the mountains, where it can get sharply colder after dark or during bad weather, this is often how hypothermia develops: first too much clothing, then wet with sweat, then unable to get dry when the weather turns.

There’s a saying among people who spend time outside: “cotton kills.” It’s a good sound bite, and has some truth in it – cotton soaks up moisture easily and doesn’t let it go quickly, so a damp cotton shirt in freezing temperatures will draw heat from your body for a very long time. But the saying is too strong, and doesn’t tell the whole story. The qualities that make cotton dangerous in cold weather are useful in hot, dry places, where moisture on the skin makes you cooler as it evaporates. To reject cotton completely is like refusing to use the sustain pedal on a piano because it can sometimes make things unclear; the pedal itself isn’t the problem, you simply need to understand when to use it.

What was really getting to me at the Hoh, though, wasn’t cotton. It was polyester. And this is important, because polyester is what most outdoor clothing is made of. It’s cheap, and it’s easy to make a lot of. But polyester is, at bottom, plastic – a synthetic fiber made from oil, which doesn’t absorb moisture. It stays right against your skin, and the sweat your body makes has nowhere to go. It gathers. It sticks. It encourages bacteria, and that’s why polyester shirts get that particular sour smell that washing never quite gets rid of. The outdoor business has put a lot of work into marketing polyester as a “performance” material, and has added various treatments to help it wick moisture, but those treatments wear out with washing. The base material is still what it is: a thick, plastic fiber that doesn’t let air through, and keeps heat and moisture on your skin. The main thing in its favor is its cost.

The fabrics that are worth the money are the ones whose good qualities are in the fiber, not added at the factory.

Merino wool is the best for most conditions (gasp, but Terlingua Threads uses wool! Yes, we know, for most conditions - keep on reading). Each merino fiber has a natural wave to it which makes tiny air pockets, and gives warmth. But the fiber also takes in water – it can hold up to thirty percent of its weight in moisture without feeling wet, because the water is absorbed into the fiber, not just on the surface. And when merino gets wet, something odd happens: the connections in the water break down, causing an exothermic reaction. The wool gives off heat as it dries. It keeps you warm even when it’s wet, which is the reverse of what cotton and polyester do. For most temperatures – from cool mornings to hard work in changeable weather – merino is the best material for a base layer.

When it’s very hot – over ninety degrees Fahrenheit – hemp is better. Hemp fibers are naturally hollow, making very small channels which pull moisture away from the skin by capillary action. Tests in the lab have shown that hemp wicks away moisture at about 2.8 grams per square meter per second, which is faster than most polyester mixes. It’s naturally antibacterial, so it doesn’t get the build-up of smell that synthetics do. It protects against UV light and – strangely for a plant fiber – is quite hard-wearing. Hemp’s combination of wicking, breathability and natural temperature control makes it the best choice when the heat itself is the problem, and not something you simply have to deal with. This is what Terlingua Threads does: making clothing from hemp and hemp-Tencel mixes, for days when the temperature goes over ninety and the wrong material becomes a danger. But for the cooler, wetter conditions Sayed and I had at Olympic, merino would have been the right choice.

No fabric does everything (and any claims so are usually hollow marketing promises rather than a physics reality). The way heat gets around, how moisture is dealt with, and how insulation functions simply won’t permit it; every material does best in some circumstances but not in others. Being properly dressed for being outside involves grasping these compromises – just as playing the piano well involves knowing where each dynamic instruction goes.

The following day, Sayed and I went to the Olympic coast, and the temperature fell to the high 40s. It was cloudy, humid, and a Pacific wind blew in from the sea, the sort of cold that causes you to pull your jacket up to your chin. Dark, barnacle-covered rocks with birds nesting on them stood in the waves, and the beach extended empty and bare in either direction.

I now truly required the layers I’d been complaining about the previous day. However, my polyester undershirt – the one which had become soaked with perspiration at the Hoh – was still sticky. It hadn’t completely dried during the night. I hadn’t taken a second undershirt as I hadn’t anticipated needing one. Why should two days in the same national park demand different undershirts?

The answer is that Olympic isn’t genuinely a single park. The Hoh Rainforest, at 600 feet and in warm sunshine, has no more connection to the Pacific coastline in a spring breeze than a pool does to a chilly lake. Consequently, I spent the coastal day with a wet, smelly shirt against my skin, depending on my fleece and down jacket to make up for it. It did, though just barely. But I felt that clammy polyester on my body the whole day. A mistake at the Hoh had come with me to the coast. Had I been wearing merino, the wool would have handled the moisture, fought the smell, and been good to go once more the next day. Instead, the inexpensive polyester had let me down in the heat and was now letting me down in the cold. Two differing environments, and a single wrong undershirt ruining everything above it.

I was raised in a home where the answer to cold was invariably another layer. The idea was absorbed: if you were unsure, put another one on. And it’s typically the wrong protocol. In the outdoors, where your body’s temperature control is the difference between being comfortable and being in trouble, the impulse to add more can cause the issue you were attempting to avoid.

Slowly, through the imprecise experimentation Sally Rehfeldt would have remembered from my Kabalevsky time, I learned that frequently, less is more when the less is of a higher quality. Two carefully selected layers do better than four cheap ones. One merino undershirt which manages moisture, controls temperature, and resists odor will keep you more comfortable in a wider range of conditions than a polyester shirt, a cotton sweatshirt, a fleece, and a waterproof shell all worn at once.

The skill is in knowing what the situation asks for and providing precisely that – not more, not less.