Shorts all year round

my legs got barbecued last summer walking above the bushline, i should have thought about taking longs with a good weather forecast. knee length shorts werent enough. i'll be wearing longs next time i'm in that situation...

Shorts above the knee. So it's really just my knees exposed when wearing gaiters. I call them my 'radiators' and they get plenty of sunscreen on them. I'm still looking for a strong, stretchy, lightweight pair of pants that dry fast. I do get a bit sick of digging out matagouri thorns from my legs, gorse is much worse as they are too small to remove. In winter it's the traditional leggings with shorts. It's a right royal nuisance to remove them when the temps shoot up. So I've been experimenting with long ski socks and 3/4 shorts or leggings (or summer shorts). I use this combo when MTBing and it's actually a good solution. Just push the sock down when hot and pull it back up when cold. MTBers use "pipes" too, an over-the-knee lycra legging with zips at the hem and they are held in place on the thigh with grip elastic. They don't work for me. They are either too tight or too loose. You could go as far as to wear some Olivia Newton John leg warmers if the urge took you :-)

Shorts are common in New Zealand although I have seen a drift away from them in recent years. Some countries overseas will look at you funny if wearing shorts. Many reasons some logical some not. Water resistant trousers are not that much worse than shorts I posted a picture on a campstove forum of a afternoon tea shot taken in snow at the junction of the Roaring Stag and Herapai hut tracks of a dragonfly stove melting snow for coffee and all of us standing around waiting in our favorite shorts. More comment was had about the shorts than the stove.

@geeves, may we see the photo too? Sounds like a major talking point :-)

I'm trialling the Earth, Sea, Sky Prolite trousers. They're really stretchy so don't catch at the knee going uphill. I walked in heavy rain in them last Saturday evening. It will be interesting to see how they go in thorny vegetation though.

@Honora Keen to hear what you think about them longer term. I've big soft spot for Earth Sea Sky. I like buying NZ made just on principle.

Absolutely. I so admire them for going for the less profitable option. Very nice family to deal with.

I've been using ESS Prolite trousers for many years now, and I really like them. I don't bother with them for tramping (and am not sure if I would), but I've found them really good as adaptable day-to-day clothes. I'd spend 45 minutes walking to work and back through the town belt (mud, trees, rain, etc), manage to pass them off as office clothes during the day and brush off the dried dirt under the desk when nobody's looking, then walk home at the end of the day. I liked them enough that when living in Australia for a couple of years, I mail-ordered more from Bivouac. Generally it also means I can forget what I'm doing when away from home and hop up a hill or something, without having to worry about what I'm wearing. They're light and fold up well, and ESS's design isn't covered in bulky pockets and domes and zips in impractical places like knee-bends. During this time I've had a couple of pairs that've been torn on climbing over fences and the like (plus my prolite shorts suffered a small tear from the end of a grubber when doing some track work a few weeks ago), but generally it hasn't been much of an issue. I've pushed through light bush and gorse with few problems, but if it was thorny and clingy I might be more weary of them tearing. In my experience if they get rained on then they do also tend to stay wet for a while if sitting around. I'll happily buy non-NZ-made when it's fit for purpose and competitively priced. One of the attractive points of NZ-made for me, though, is that I can usually contact the manufacturer and immediately get a cheerful response from someone who actually knows and cares about what they're making.

"@geeves, may we see the photo too? Sounds like a major talking point :-)" Had to put it somewhere accessible first http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/edd1/ryhc7wgpmxxbhyrzg.jpg

Quintessentially kiwi... love it. :-)