OT: Warm socks

[J Miller]

Since my wife is out in the weather with her job and hates wet feet, she bought a pair of rubber boots last winter. They work great keeping her feet dry. But they are not insulated.
Since my wife is allergic to wool, what kind of socks are out there that would keep her feet warm?
They need to be fairly thin and allow sweat to wick away from her feet.

Joe

[Old Ironsights]

Silk.

[Hobie]

Underarmor makes a great product. Both the SIL and I like ours. However, when I go to the website they don't have what we've been wearing. Too bad about the wool allergy. I prefer to wear SmartWool socks. I vary the weight according to the weather but I can wear them comfortably in quite warm weather as well as in the cold.

[Pete44ru]

It's hard to beat the 85% wool Norwegian-type Ragg wool hiking socks, sold at the outdoor chain stores & Cabela's.
She can wear a pair of white silk sock liners to wick away the moisture & keep the wool off her skin.

Socks: http://www.cabelas.com/prod-1/0009750811398a.shtml

Liners: http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/templ ... ISO-8859-1

.

[Hobie]

I'm with Pete. Just be sure you get a quality "liner" sock. Some aren't suitable. They bunch up or grab and bunch the outer sock.

[Borregos]

Pete44ru +1

[Rusty]

I had a book many years ago called "Paradise Below Zero" that I referenced for winter camping trips in cold climates. the silk + wool has been used for years.

I also used insulated rubber boots with great success. The ones I had were insulated with a steel toe for wearing in the coal mines.

[45Jack]

Joe,
I'm a real fan of wool. I'll wear wool long johns under wool pants and shirt with wool socks.
Also like silk. but I'm not allergic to wool, and depending on how allergic you wife is the silk liner may not be enough.

You could try polar fleece socks or polar fleece with polypropylene liners.
fleece socks aren't cheap, but neither are good wool socks.
Either way they're a worthwhile investment. If you feet are miserable, all of you is miserable.
Jack

Edit: PS: Rusty, Paradise Below Zero by Calvin Rutstrum, great book.

[Old Ironsights]

When I rotated from FRG to AK, the first thing that happened to me after getting my GI was to spend a month north of Fairbanks... in Jan/Feb... in a GP Small...

They had recently "adopted" the idiotic "Wooly Bear" PolyPro jumpsuit & Goretex ECWCS "die in your own frozen sweat" system.

I refused to wear it.

In a fit of common sense borne of growing up in the mountains of Wyoming, between Clothing Sales & the Surplus Store had bought 1950s era OD wool everything.

Yes, I still wore the issue PolyPro thermals, but under the ECWCS shell (over the thermals) I was wearing nothing but wool LAYERS instead of that stupid single-"layer" cold-when-wet woolybear.

I even had a visiting General yell at me for "being out of uniform" (I was sweating from exertion, so I had taken off the ECWCS jacet and was wearing only my Thermals, Wool Pants & Wooly Pully (brown sweater) while working). Fortunately for this Latrine Lawyer I had a copy of the regs, so he couldn't say too much...

Anyway, somehow in all of that I was one of the few guys who didn't get sick... even though it was -70+ most of the time. (I also refused to sleep in the overheated GP... but that's another story...)

Funny how smart those old guys were...