Looking for a new pair of hunting gloves that won’t break your budget? Then the Manzella Tracker hunting gloves might just be the ticket for you. I’ve recently had the opportunity to try a pair out through an opportunity with www.outdoorbloggernetwork.com which offered me a free pair to try out.
Once Manzella shipped my pair to me, I was skeptical when I looked at them for the first time. They felt and looked too thin to provide any real warmth; I soon found out that I was wrong on that thought. You see living here in Michigan and putting up with some severe winters at times I’ve tried to find a pair of warm and dry gloves that would do just that, keep me warm and dry. The ones that I have found in the past that provided any warmth at all were always bulky which made it hard to grip anything.
My first test run came on the day I received them. I headed to work that evening with a temperature in the single digits and dropping! The car I drive provides little to no heat so keeping my hands warm is a must, what better way to test the new gloves. On my 20 minute drive my digits never felt the first hint of being cold; as a matter of fact they were really warm. Ok so they passed the warmth test for 20 minutes.
I was worried about how dry could they really keep my hands out in the cold elements so I decided to take them ice fishing the next weekend. With drilling holes in the ice along with dipping the holes clean and doing what ice fisherman do these gloves were going to get wet! Usually I wind up pulling a wet pair of gloves off and just throwing them in a bucket after an hour on the ice, 
but not this day! I was surprised that the gloves not only kept me warm for hours on end but they kept me dry as well. As you can see in the photo, a thin layer of ice formed on the finger tips of the glove and my hands were warm and dry.
I also found out that since these gloves were fairly thin, they also provided good dexterity while wearing them. Now I couldn’t bait a hook, but reeling in fish wasn’t a problem. I found that I could use all of my outdoor gear that day with no problem of bulky materials getting in the way.
My last effort to try and make these gloves fail was to use them for a couple of hours on a snow blower after a 10 inch snowfall. I thought maybe with all of the vibration while pushing the big blower it might work the seams loose or pop a thread. NOPE! They are as tight as a bug in a rug! So despite my best efforts of trying to make them fail in some way or another they performed flawlessly.
So down to the brass tacks on this one, they retail for $35.00 on their webpage http://www.manzella.com . To me that is a fair price to pay for a warm, dry and dependable pair of gloves!
The tech side of them:
The Shell: is water repellant micro poly twill
The Palm: is synthetic suede
The Lining: is fleece lined
The Insulation: 100 grams of Thinsulate X-Static
The Insert: Hydroblok WPB
Patterns: Mossy Oak Treestand and Realtree AP camo
Other features:
Two of the things I really liked about these gloves were the elastic gathers with cynch straps around the wrist area that made them nice and snug around your hands along with the string gathers at the mouth of the glove that provided a tight fit to keep cold and snow out of them! The string gathers allowed you to pull the glove over the end of your coat sleeves and close off any opportunity for anything to enter the gloves!
I didn’t get to really try out the exclusive MOC trigger finger feature as of yet. My endeavors to hit the coyote trails have been a bust so far this season. I still hope to get out and give them a try and if I do I will update this report.
Dislikes:
I can only find two things that I didn’t like about the gloves and are not that big of a deal. When pulling the gloves off, you can feel the inside material of the fingers begins to pull backwards as you slip your hand out of them. I think if they somehow sewed or tacked each end of the inside finger material to the inside of the outer shell it would help secure them from wanting to pull backwards. The other thing is that I would like to see some other material than synthetic suede on the palms. I know that after a while that material tends to break down. Although after running the snow blower for a few hours straight, they held up with no noticeable wear. I would have thought that the stitching would have pulled loose from the material from all the vibration, tugging and pulling but it didn’t.
The Grade: 1 through 10 (1 = fail and 10 = excellent)
Quality: 8.5 (would be a 9 except for the finger problem mentioned above)
Warmth: 10
Dryness: 10
Dexterity/Fit: 9
Other Features: 9
Overall if you’re looking for a good pair of gloves I recommend spending the $35 for these gloves. I’ve spent $30 on several pair of gloves with poor results, but these are definitely worth the money!
Disclaimer:
I have received these Manzella Tracker Gloves free of charge to test and review. The opinions expressed above are my independent thoughts and experiences.
