The North Face Pumori Down Parka review

The North Face Pumori Down Parka is a wonderfully warm technical down parka from one of the biggest brands in the business. Lightweight, packable and incredibly lofty, it’s been designed to keep you warm on high-Alpine adventures and mountaineering trips in some truly cold temperatures — if you can afford the high price tag.

The North Face Pumori Down Parka

Ideal for: High-Alpine mountaineering, backpacking, or hiking during deep winter (and for keeping warm around camp).

Not suitable for: As a warm layer when moving or doing any high-output activities.

The North Face’s Pumori Down Parka is a seriously warm, beautifully lofty and decidedly technical down jacket that has been designed to keep you warm in places where you have no biological right to be so, such as at serious altitudes or when camping in brutally cold conditions.

North Face Pumori Down Parka review

Down jackets are a staple of winter hillwalking. Just head up Pen y Fan any time between October and March and you’re bound to see puffies of all shapes and sizes, be they burly jackets like Mountain Equipment Lightlines or Decathlon’s Forclaz MT900, or lighter weight jackets like Patagonia’s ever-popular down sweater. And, increasingly, The North Face has stepped into the insulating jacket market over the last few years with their beloved Thermoball line owning much of the market in the shoulder seasons.

When it comes to deep winter warmth, the Pumori Down Parka is The North Face’s warmest and most technical down layer, designed for high-Alpine mountaineering and backpacking trips through some seriously frosty terrain. Packed with 800-fill power high-quality goose down, the Pumori is lofty, super warm and unbelievably cosy — all while weighing an incredibly impressive 617 g (on average). In that sense, the warmth this jacket delivers for the weight is vastly superior to any down parka jacket we’ve tested before. But that quality doesn’t come cheap.

When bought directly from The North Face, the Pumori Down Parka will set you back £630 at the time of writing. And while you can often find these on offer at speciality retailers during sales promotions (LD Mountain Centre was selling them at a 50% discount as a part of their 2022/2023 Winter Sale, for example), the jacket is the priciest we’ve ever tested. So how did it perform? And is The North Face Pumori Down Parka worth the high price tag?

Designed for technical mountaineering escapades, the first thing you need to understand is that the Pumori was built with intention. It’s lofty, lightweight, and very technical. It comes with a helmet-compatible hood which is like wrapping your face in a cloud, deep hand pockets, internal pockets for stashing gloves or for keeping water from freezing, and a dainty little stuff sack with a drawcord that allows you to pack the Pumori down without snagging it on any zips. Designed to be carried up mountains (or worn during ascents of summits at dizzyingly high altitudes), the jacket comes with a very thin nylon outer that is prone to tearing or snagging and is one of the most technical-looking jackets we tested during the 2022/2023 winter season. That being said, in true The North Face style, the coat is still a stunning thing to look at: The woven baffles keep drafts to a minimum and give the coat a cool, unique look, and the loftiness of the Pumori instantly makes you want to crawl inside and fall asleep. Just be aware: This technical jacket has been designed with performance in mind, not fashion. So even though gorp-core fanatics might be happy to wear this to the pub, most of us probably won’t: This jacket is built for the mountains, and that’s probably the only place most of us will ever wear it due to the cut and the look of the coat. Which, to be fair, isn’t something we can deduct points from The North Face for. But, in the UK, when the weather isn’t aggressive enough to warrant this sort of coat on most adventures, we find that burly deep winter down jackets tend to turn into the jacket you wear around town on the coldest winter days, and we don’t think the Pumori lends itself well to that use case.

Our experience using the North Face Pumori Down Parka

To test The North Face Pumori Down Parka, we took this jacket out on numerous winter adventures in temperatures ranging from 6 degrees Celsius down the minus 12 degrees Celsius. We took it wildcamping in the western fringes of the Brecon Beacons where we tested its ability to keep us warm in wet, windy and freezing conditions, we took it on numerous winter backpacking and wildcamping trips across Dartmoor, and one of our editors even wore it during a very chilly wintery backpacking trip through Siponkoori National Park in Finland. So what did we think?

Packed size and weight

The first thing we particularly appreciated about the Pumori is the impressive warmth-to-weight ratio. Weighing just over 600 grams, this jacket doesn’t add much extra bulk to otherwise fully loaded winter setups and the warmth it delivers for those 600 grams is astounding. What’s more, due to the high-quality 800-fill power down, the Pumori packs down to the size of a mini football, especially if you vacuum seal it in a dry bag or cinch it down tightly in the provided lightweight stuff sack. This means we were able to easily carry it in a 45-litre winter set-up, and didn’t even notice it in the top of a 60-litre pack.

Loft

When it comes to the loftiness of the jacket, The North Face Pumori Down Parka is one of the plumpest puffiest we’ve ever tested. In fact, when we tested this coat over 3-days in the western Brecon Beacons, we put it up against the budget Decathlon MT900 -18 Down Jacket and the Mountain Equipment Lightline, one of our favourite puffies to date. And when it comes to loftiness, the Pumori won every time. It springs back into action the second you take it out of your bag, and the lightweight materials and 800-fill power are just so comfy to wear. For added cosiness, the hood is filled with the same quality and quantity of goose down as the rest of the coat, so you can quickly cocoon your head in a cloud of warmth. What’s more, being fully helmet compatible, the hood can be cinched tight around your head for added comfort.

Fit

The fit of the Pumori is decidedly boxy. Again, this jacket has been built for high-altitude mountaineering, so it’s only logical that the cut should fit over a climbing harness. For that reason, it can feel a little loose when you wear it over a t-shirt, so you may want to consider sizing down. We tested a men’s medium, for example, and found it to be rather wide. Additionally, the Pumori doesn’t come with clasps or fasteners around the hip or the cuffs so you can’t tighten it down. A design decision that was undoubtedly implemented to save weight and packability, it does mean the odd draft can ride up from below the jacket when not wearing it under a shell, which is something we’d love to see The North Face address on future iterations.

Warmth

Overall, we found The North Face Pumori Down Parka to be very warm and cosy – ideal for milling around camp or for tossing on when taking a break when backpacking. Being in the UK, we weren’t able to test it for the type of environments this thing was built for (think Denali, Gran Paradiso or Mont Blanc expeditions), but we did use it dozens of times over 4 months in typical British conditions, such as on super cold wild camps, freezing winter hikes and some low-level mountaineering. Interestingly, however, when worn as an outer layer, we didn’t find the Pumori to be much warmer than the likes of the Mountain Equipment Lightline or the budget Forclaz MT900 -18 Down Jacket, two lines that are significantly cheaper than the Pumori. But it does pack down significantly smaller. Both of these jackets come with lower-grade down and thicker shells, which may explain why they were a little more adept at keeping out drafts (and therefore making us feel warmer). But if you were to pair the Pumori with a large hardshell, something like The North Face Summit Pumori Futurelight (as you undoubtedly would when used on Denali, Gran Paradiso or Mont Blanc expeditions; the stuff this coat was built for), the Pumori would easily outperform the other two. But how often are you going to be at 4,000 metres or more?

Durability and waterproofness

Finally, the last thing to be aware of is the durability and waterproofness of the materials used. Both of which are questionable in our eyes: Manufactured from a lightweight nylon treated with a DWR coating, the jacket is able to stave off very small amounts of rain for a short period, but it quickly wets out. And once your down gets wet, it loses much of its ability to keep you warm. Again, however, this jacket hasn’t been built to keep you dry in a winter storm: It’s here to keep you warm in cold, dry conditions. Regarding the durability of the nylon shell, the material is very thin and lightweight and will easily tear if you snag it. Again, for those reasons, The North Face recommend you wear the Pumori under a hardshell.

North Face Pumori Down Parka FAQs

The North Face Pumori Down Parka is a super warm, lofty down jacket that has been designed to keep you warm in the coldest places. Packed with 800-fill power down that springs back into action the second you take it out of its stuff sack and weighing only 617 g, it delivers industry-leading warmth for its weight. For that reason, it’s definitely too warm for 90% of UK-based adventures; we’d only turn to it when camping in truly cold winter conditions or when mountaineering in Scotland.
The North Face Pumori Down Parka isn’t waterproof at all - nor has it been designed to be so. To maintain some water repellency, the material has been treated with a DWR coating on the outside, though you should only wear this in any form of rain when under an appropriate waterproof shell.
The Mountain Equipment Lightline isn’t a waterproof jacket. It’s designed to offer exceptional warmth in a packable and lightweight package. It is, however, manufactured from an ultra-durable 40-Denier outer fabric and comes with a DWR coating as standard. This means it can put up with very light drizzle and short showers, but you’re going to want to wear it under a shell if the weather gets any worse than that.
If you’re heading into environments where the technical design considerations are necessary and helpful, such as spending many days and nights mountaineering through the Scottish winter, or tackling summits farther afield such as Denali, Mt. Blanc or similar, then yes, the Pumori’s high £630 price tag may be worth it for you. For the vast majority of UK adventures, however, the jacket delivers more technical prowess than is arguably necessary, so you could consider saving some money and looking at the likes of the Patagonia Fitz Roy Parka, the Rab Mythic Ultra or the Neutrino Pro, or the Mountain Equipment Lightline.
Due to the lightweight materials used, The North Face Pumori Down Parka is not as durable as many similar (albeit heavier) jackets in this category, such as the Mountain Equipment Lightline.

Conclusion

Overall, we really enjoyed testing The North Face Pumori Down Parka. Warm, packable, and with a very well-considered design, the Pumori’s technical chops are palpable the second you toss it on. For UK conditions, however, we kept coming back to the question of how often we’d be able to make use of it in this country. And for £630, this is a reasonable consideration. If you can afford it, the Pumori is undoubtedly one of the best down parkas out there, delivering unbeatable warmth to weight and excellent packability. But for 99% UK conditions, cheaper alternatives will do just as good a job.

The North Face Pumori Down Parka review