Enhanced Hiking Experience in Cold Conditions: Keen upgrades its renowned Hightrail hiking boots with insulation and improved traction, offering versatility during the winter months.
The Keen Hightrail Polar hiking boot is a winter-ready addition to Keen's popular Hightrail line, designed to provide lightweight comfort and superior performance on all seasons, especially during the coldest months.
Key Features
The Hightrail Polar features a range of enhancements to tackle the challenges of winter hiking:
- Insulation: The Hightrail Polar includes added insulation compared with the regular Hightrail, providing warmth for those chilly winter hikes.
- Winter outsole: Keen has fitted a new, more aggressive outsole designed for improved traction in winter conditions, offering better grip on mud, snow, and ice-prone trails.
- Lightweight, sporty design: The boots retain the Hightrail’s fast-and-light trainer-like silhouette for agility and everyday wearability, rather than the bulky mountaineering boot feel.
- Durable ethically sourced leather upper: The uppers use ethically sourced leather to provide robustness while maintaining the model’s sporty look.
- Waterproofing: The Hightrail family has been offered with waterproof breathable membranes in other Hightrail models; the Polar variant is described as winterized, indicating waterproofing is a design focus.
In Practice
The Hightrail Polar's key features translate into practical benefits:
- Warmth: Added insulation makes the Hightrail Polar better suited to cold-weather hiking than the uninsulated Hightrail.
- Improved grip: The revised outsole provides more confidence on slippery, snowy, or muddy surfaces compared with the original Hightrail.
- Carry-over comfort and lightness: Expect the comfort, flexibility, and relatively light weight characteristic of the Hightrail line to remain.
Limitations
While the Hightrail Polar offers impressive features, some specific details are not specified in the summary review. For precise performance numbers, it's essential to check the official product page or spec sheet for details on the insulation rating, outsole compound and lug depth, and waterproof membrane name.
Availability and Pricing
The Keen Hightrail Polar hiking boot is available now, both for men and women, in black. The price is $165 / £145.
Additional Information
The KEEN.FREEZE outsole is made with a rubber compound that stays flexible when it gets below freezing, and the multi-directional lugs provide better traction on ice and snow. The boots also come with Eco Anti-Odor for pesticide-free odor control.
The Keen Hightrail Polar hiking boot is part of the Hightrail line that launched this spring. Adventure Staff Writer Will Symons gave the Keen Hightrail EXP nearly perfect marks for comfort, grip, waterproofing, and flexibility.
- The Keen Hightrail Polar, with its outdoor-living focused design, provides a perfect lifestyle choice for enthusiasts looking to enjoy home-and-garden activities or engage in sports like winter hiking, with its insulated, waterproof, and grippy features.
- In the realm of sports, the Keen Hightrail Polar combines lightweight comfort, superior performance, and an aggressive outsole for excellent traction on ice, snow, and mud when participating in outdoor-living activities, such as winter hiking.
