Pro Tips For Warming Your Hands and Using Fingerless Gloves
Add a mitt overtop for use in cold, windy, or wet weather
For use in cold, windy, and wet weather, you may choose to bring a shell mitt for modular layering. Here is a lightweight Gore-Tex shell mitt, and here is an ultralight shell mitt. Keep the fingerless glove on for all day cold-weather-wear, and pull out the shell mitts for cold rain. Shell mitts usually only weigh 1-2 ounces and are generally quite packable. While their wind/waterproofness solves for fingerless gloves’ biggest weakness, it is a notable downside that your finger tips will be in direct contact with the inside of the shell; it’s fine but feels like wearing plastic and is less comfy than layering shell mitts over full finger gloves.
Warm your hands with a hot drink
Mornings in the mountains are often the coldest and most difficult on your hands. Disassembling a frost covered tent, pulling out freezing cold stakes and loading up a backpack is hard when your hands are operating at less than 100% dexterity due to numbing cold. For situations like these, we recommend hot drink warming. Pour yourself a nice hot cup of coffee or tea and then begin taking the tent down. Pull the stakes out, then pause for a minute to hold your mug to absorb heat. Shake out the tent and roll it up, then go back to holding your mug. Put everything in the pack, hold your mug. Alternating between cold touch and warm touch is a really effective way to prevent numb fingers.
Use your base and mid-layer thumb holes
Supplement your fingerless gloves with a base and fleece mid-layer that has thumb loops. If you can put two more layers over the palm of your hand, this will slightly improve blood flow and circulation to your fingers.
Put your trekking poles away and scrunch hands into rain jacket sleeves
In truly awful conditions like sleet or cold rain, you may wish to put your trekking poles away and retreat your hands into your rain jacket sleeves. This is a great reason to size up when choosing a rain jacket. Having a shell sleeve to retreat into can be make or break when going over a pass or summit in foul weather.
Windmill your arms to centrifuge blood to your fingertips
A tip we picked up from ice climbers is windmilling your arms. This creates a centrifuge effect that uses physics to force blood into your finger tips, warming them up via circulation.
Add sock mitts
It’s not fun and it’s definitely not sexy, but if you really need to warm your hands up, you can pull socks on over your fingerless gloves to increase insulation and wind protection. This is effective when dexterity is not required.
Hike faster to generate more body heat
When all else fails and your hands are just really cold, you probably would still be having a bad time with full-finger gloves. Either way, crank up the hiking speed to generate more body heat and get off that pass ASAP.
