Frigid temperatures, last night's powder dump and the promise of superb skiing are all conspiring to make me break my new year's resolution—and we're still in the first week of January!

I had vowed to try winter whitewater paddling. While that pledge is looking less and less tempting given the rapidly growing ice ramparts on the margins of our local whitewater run (and given my post new year's sobriety), it has gotten me fired up to start testing out a new product called Woolpower.


New to North American markets, I should say, because Woolpower has been around for 35 years in Sweden, where it's made.

For the past couple decades the high-tech thing to wear under your drysuit in cold weather has been some sort of oil-based fabric like polypropylene or polyester fleece. The downside of the stuff is that it reeks within five minutes of putting it on, never mind after a few hours of hard play underneath your Gore-Tex.

Lately there's been a resurgence of wool popularity with soft, non-itchy merino underlayers. Like polyester, wool is warm when wet, but it doesn't produce the same horrible smells.

Wool is expensive, though, a bit harder to maintain perhaps, and doesn't draw moisture away from the body, or wick, as well as synthetics—it just sucks it up and keeps you warm regardless.

"Ullfrotté Original" is a fabric developed in Sweden for rugged Scandinavian outdoorspeople and NATO military forces that combines the advantages of wool with the wicking properties of synthetics. The company describes it like this,

Ullfrotté Original is the material developed by Woolpower in Östersund in the early 1970’s in collaboration with the Swedish military, scientists, doctors and survival experts. The textile is highly wear resistant and consists of fine Merino wool, polyamide/polyester and air. Products manufactured using Ullfrotté Original are sold today under the brand name Woolpower.

Woolpower is now becoming more widely avaiable in North America through retailers like The Canadian Outdoor Equipment Company in Port Credit (Mississauga), Ontario, and is developing a following among paddlers.

Rapid just received a batch of Woolpower samples that we'll be testing out over the next few months—though I think it will be under my ski parka rather than a drysuit...at least for the next month or two.