Alpinestars Andes tourer pants review

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Warren

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I updated my previous cool to cold weather Alpinestars ST-5 Drystar pants to the new Andes Tourer drystar pants. So far however I have not found them very good.

The pants have a permeant rain liner in adventure styling. Alpinestars use a material they call Drystar but in my experience these pants are water resistant not waterproof.

My old Drystar ST5 pants were waterproof for awhile then seemed to loose that. They had waterproof pockets which were handy. The Andes has two side/leg low mounted pockets which are in a comfortable position when riding but are not waterproof.

There is two exhaust vents each side adjacent to the pockets. The effectiveness of these is rather limited. If they had been flipped about face and put on the front side of the legs a little lower then they might have been really good to assist getting some air to the part of the legs which I find gets warmest, behind the knee lower leg section. The matching jacket has two similar vents and they work quite well in this way at the shoulders.

There is a zip out quilted liner and it works ok but is not as warm as the one in the ST-5 pants.

In my previous Alpinestar Drystar pants I needed what was labelled as a size 2XL (despite my regular pant size being much smaller) so I ordered same in these but they were miles too big for me and impossible to wear them so I exchanged for XL and these seemed to be a perfect fit. Length and waist and inner leg all are correct.

Standing straight the bottom of the pants almost touch the floor so good leg length, however in use on a motorcycle with legs bent the pants ride up my legs about 30 cm. If not constantly pulled down by hand while riding they will ride up and sit about even with the top of my boots allowing cold air and rain into my boots and generally feeling uncomfortable. The cut of the pants is generic and not curved for motorcycle riding.

There is a couple of other things to mention about them. See the black crouch section in the photo, this area retains water in the rain which means you get very cold around those parts of your body with cold water close by although fortunately that area of liner seemed not to leak through.

Above, the crouch area that stays wet and gets cold made me wish I had a seat heater on my last tour.

Update, I ordered some elastic pant clips to try hold the pants down when riding.

Update –  I tried these clips on my recent 6 day tour. The pants desire to ride up my legs is stronger than the clips which could not hold them down and soon after getting on the bike they let go and spring off the pants. It might be possible to fit some sort of eyelet to the pants and then use a different strap to hold them down but starting to get desperate and I have simply returned to my old model pants and packed these away for now.

Update 2 – This is my new solution to the pants wanting to ride up above the top of my boots.

I have sewn on elastic boot straps that I hope will force the pants to remain down. My next tour is in a month so I shall report back after then the effectiveness of this hack.

Final update – The elastic straps worked. The elastic is sturdy but allows a fair bit of expansion so holds the legs about where my original Drystar pants sit by themselves. After wearing them like this on a few tours they molded to my leg shape or something and now no longer want to ride up much.

However they have now lost all their water resistance. I have tried to treat them as suggested with outer shell water repellent but they still do not repel water much.

Update – I recently found a video on the Canadian FortNine channel that shows Alpinestars Drystar liner is basically useless. No more Alpinestars gear for me.