Columbia Youth Glennaker Rain Jacket Review: A Wet Season on the Trail

In February I took my granddaughter Hattie out to Mammoth Cave in her old sneakers, with a leaky plastic bottle in my tote and a thin poncho I found in the closet. We made it about a mile. She had wet socks and a blister starting on her left heel, she kept stopping to ask me for water, and the poncho tore on a branch somewhere along the way. We turned around. I drove home with a quiet car and a knot in my stomach.

That night I sat at the kitchen table and ordered five things in one order, and the Columbia Youth Glennaker Rain Jacket was the last of them. It arrived that week. The first Saturday of March we walked with all of it for the first time. So I have had this jacket in the bottom of the pack for about eight months now, through a wet spring, a hot summer and into fall, across roughly thirty Saturdays. I know what it does. I also know what it does not do, and the Columbia listing is not especially eager to tell you the second part.

How I've Used It

Our Saturdays run two to three miles on the surface trails at Mammoth Cave, or the walking paths at Lost River Cave when the weather is doubtful and I want to stay close to the car. Hattie is eight, in third grade. She keeps a spiral notebook of what she sees, which was my idea from my classroom years, and the notebook rides in the pack next to the jacket.

The jacket does not come out unless it needs to. Rain or not, it is rolled up in the main compartment of her pack on every Mammoth Cave walk. That sounds wasteful until you have been caught a mile from the car in April. A shell only helps if it is with you, and this one rolls to about the size of a paperback.

There is a small routine to packing it that I have settled into. I lay the jacket on the kitchen counter, fold the sleeves across the chest, fold it in thirds, and roll it from the hood down so the hood ends up on the outside. It goes in the main compartment against her back, which is where a pack carries weight best anyway. In March I did the rolling. By May Hattie was doing it herself, badly, with one sleeve always escaping, and I let her, because a child who packs her own rain jacket is a child who remembers she has one. The first Saturday of March we walked at Mammoth Cave in clear, cold, dry weather and never took it out. It rode the whole two and a half miles and I decided that was the entire point of it.

I bought the Youth Medium on purpose, a size up, so her fleece would fit underneath without a wrestling match. She is small for eight and the sleeves run a little long. That has been the right call. In cold weather the fleece goes under and the jacket goes over and she is fine. In warm weather the jacket goes over a t-shirt and nothing else, and that is where I have my one real complaint, which I will get to.

What the Shell Does Well

The fabric is 100% nylon and the listing calls it waterproof, and in the rain we have actually stood in, it behaved like a waterproof shell. The zip front goes up to her chin. The hood comes up over her head and stays there as long as she is not running. Two slant pockets hold a folded leaf or a couple of acorns, which for Hattie is the actual purpose of pockets.

Lost River in town is where I test small things, because the paths are short and the car is close. In early June we walked there in a steady drizzle for about forty minutes. When we got back to the Forester I shook the jacket out and the water ran off in beads instead of soaking in, and the inside was dry to the touch. I hung it over the passenger seat headrest for the ride home and it was ready to roll again the following Saturday. That is not a dramatic result. It is exactly the result I wanted, and it is worth saying plainly because so much rain gear for children fails at it.

It is machine wash. That matters more than it sounds. A child's rain jacket gets mud on the hem, sap on the sleeve, and something unidentified on the cuff by June. I have washed it on a normal cycle and hung it on the hook by the back door and it has come back fine every time. No peeling, no stiffening, no change to how the water beads.

The best thing I can say about it is that I forget about it. It is a shell, so it weighs very little, and Hattie never complains about carrying it in the pack. The jacket she had before was a poncho, and a poncho is not a piece of clothing. It is a plastic bag with opinions. This is a garment with a zipper and a hood and sleeves that end where sleeves should end, so she can walk in it normally instead of holding it shut with both hands.

The One Real Downpour

Late April, a Saturday, about a mile out at Mammoth Cave. The rain came in fast from behind us, the way it does in Kentucky in spring, and we had about twenty five minutes of walking to get back to the car. Not a drizzle. Actual rain, steady and cold.

Here is what I did in the thirty seconds before we started walking. I had her take the fleece off, because a soaked fleece is worse than no fleece and it would have been wet for the ride home either way. I put the jacket on over her t-shirt, zipped it to her chin, pulled the hood up, and told her we were walking, not running. She wanted to run. I said no, because that trail was slick limestone and I am sixty one years old and no use to anybody on the ground. So we walked it at an ordinary pace, her in front where I could see her, and the rain came at our backs the whole way, which is the friendliest direction rain can come from.

Her top half stayed dry. Her shirt was still dry when we reached the Forester, and I put my hand flat on her back to check, because I did not quite believe it. Her pants were soaked through, since I had not thought about rain pants for an eight year old, and her boots held, and she laughed the entire mile back. It is the only time I have been genuinely glad about a piece of gear in front of her, because the alternative was a cold, wet, miserable child and a spoiled Saturday.

I want to be precise about that, because a review that says "kept her dry in a downpour" without the rest is not much of a review. The jacket kept her trunk and arms dry. It did not keep her legs dry, because it does not cover her legs. That is not a flaw in the jacket. That is a gap in my planning, and it is the reason I now say out loud to other grandparents: if you are buying the jacket, think about the legs too.

Her shirt was dry when we got to the car. Her pants were soaked through because I had not thought about rain pants for an eight-year-old.

Where It Falls Short

It is a shell and it is not insulated, and Columbia says so, but people do not read carefully and then get annoyed. On its own in fifty degree rain, this jacket keeps the water off and does nothing about the cold. Hattie needs the fleece under it. If you are buying this expecting a warm rain jacket, you are buying the wrong thing. Layer it or leave it.

The clammy problem is real. On a warm rainy day, sixty five and humid, she has come out of it with damp arms from her own sweat, not from the rain. Nylon does not breathe much. That is the trade for a jacket that actually stops water, and I have not found a child's shell that solves it. What I do is simple: on warm wet days she wears a short sleeve under it and I do not zip it all the way to her chin. She gets a little damp. She is not cold. That is an acceptable trade.

There was a Saturday in early September, warm and thick and raining lightly, when she wore it over a cotton t-shirt for about two miles and I watched her to see how it went. When we stopped at the car her shirtsleeves were damp from the inside. Not wet through. Damp, the way a shirt gets under a jacket that will not let air move. I have thought about it since and I do not believe another nylon shell would do better, because the moisture has to go somewhere and it is not going through the fabric. It is a jacket for keeping rain out. It is not a jacket for keeping a warm, sweating child comfortable, and those are two different jobs that people confuse.

The hood is loose without a hat underneath. If she is wearing a ball cap, the hood sits nicely. Without one, it slides back when she looks up at a bird, and then rain goes down her neck and she tells me about it. A hat fixes it. It is a small thing and I have not found it worth complaining about twice.

The last thing is not the jacket's fault either, but it belongs here. The sleeves run long on a child who is small for her age, which is what happens when you buy a size up on purpose. In the rain that is fine. In the dry, when she is eating a snack, the cuffs get into everything. I roll them once. Problem gone.

How It Compares to What We Had

Before this she had a thin poncho, which is not a fair comparison, so let me be fair about what changed. The poncho kept rain off her shoulders and tore on a branch. It flapped. She could not use her hands. It was gone by the end of that February walk in pieces.

The Columbia jacket is a zipped garment with a hood and two real pockets. She can walk, climb over a fallen log, hold a notebook, hold a water bottle. That is not a small upgrade in a child's willingness to keep going. The gear that gets out of their way is the gear that gets used.

I have never owned the other kids' rain shells people ask me about. I have handled one in a store, and I say so plainly when I am asked, because handling a jacket on a rack is not the same as eight months of Saturdays. What I can tell you is what this one has done, on our trails, with my granddaughter, since the first Saturday of March.

Who This Is For

Parents and grandparents of a child roughly five to twelve who want a light shell that lives in a pack and comes out when the sky turns. It is for the family that walks two or three miles and wants the child comfortable enough to keep walking and looking at things. The fit is regular, the closure is a zip, and the size-up trick works if you want a fleece under it.

It is also for the adult who has learned the hard lesson I learned in February: the cheap poncho in the bottom of the tote is not gear. It is the illusion of gear. This costs more than a poncho and considerably less than a spoiled Saturday, and the difference is that the child will actually wear it.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you need warmth. This is not an insulated coat and no amount of layering will turn it into one. If your child runs cold and you walk in real winter weather, get a proper insulated rain coat and stop reading reviews of shells.

Skip it if you want full body coverage for wet weather. This jacket covers the top half. For a child who will be out in steady rain for an hour, you need rain pants as well, and you should budget for them at the same time instead of discovering the gap a mile from the car like I did. And skip it if your child hates loose hoods and refuses hats, because the hood wants a hat under it and that is a small negotiation every single time it rains.