This PackTowel Personal Towel review is based on my use with the ‘hand’ sized towel. See my weight & specs section below for other PackTowel Personal Towel sizes.
The PackTowel Personal Towel is a great addition to both your day hiking pack and your backpacking pack, as well as your general camping gear. Even the size I use – the ‘hand’ size – can get me dry, head to toe, after a shower, plunge in the pool, or rainstorm. It takes up little room in your pack, doesn’t get smelly, and dries out fairly quickly, relative to a regular cotton towel. Plus it even has a buttoned hanging loop to fix the towel to your pack to dry when you’re on the trail.
PackTowel Personal Towel
- Soft, microfiber towel made from polyester and nylon
- 50% recycled material used in production
- Absorbs 4x its weight in water allowing it to be much lighter and compact, compared to a similar sized cotton towel
- Dries almost twice as fast as a cotton towel
- Polygiene antimicrobial treatment keeps the towel from growing mold or mildew
- Machine washable
Pro’s and Con’s
Pro’s: Take’s up little room in your pack. Hand sized version can dry you head to foot after a complete soaking. Silver chloride treatment fused to the towel’s fibers keep the towel from getting moldy or stinky even when stowed away wet. Buttoned hanging loop lets you attach your towel to your pack or anywhere at camp to dry. Towel is soft enough to clean your glasses off after a rain or waterfall spray encounter.
Con’s: There are no practical/usage cons. From a community standpoint, microfibers in general shed micro-plastics into waterways, the air, and the ocean.
Features
- Microfiber polyester and nylon blend. 80% polyester/20% nylon.
- Soft-to-the-touch texture. Soft enough to clean glasses in the field.
- 50% recycled to reduce oil drilling impact.
- Absorbs 4x its weight in water and wrings out easily.
- Dries 70% faster than comparable cotton towels of the same dimension; almost twice as fast.
- Machine washable.
What is microfiber?
Microfiber is a fiber thinner than 1 denier (1D) thread. It has a diameter of less than 10 micrometers. It is generally made of petroleum based materials, like nylon or polyester.
My Featherstone backpacking tent rain fly is made out of 20 denier nylon for a comparison.
What is Polygiene®?
Polygiene is a silver chloride salt treatment sprayed onto the pre-cut microfiber cloth that is used to make the PackTowel. It’s a permanent treatment than inhibits bacterial and fungal growth, lowering the probability that your wet towel will smell bad or be a medium for which mold grows.
Weight and Specs
The Personal PackTowl comes in 4 sizes:
| PackTowel Personal Towel | Weight | Dimensions |
|---|---|---|
| Face | 20g (0.7 oz.) | 10 x 14 in. |
| Hand | 80g (2.9 oz.) | 16.5 x 36 in. |
| Body | 180g (6.4 oz.) | 25 x 54 in. |
| Beach | 280g (9.7 oz.) | 36 x 59 in. |
But as a hiker/camper/backpacker, would it be better to chose a towel from the Ultralight PackTowel series?
| PackTowel Ultralight Towel | Weight | Dimensions |
|---|---|---|
| Face | 10g (0.5 oz.) | 10 x 14 in. |
| Hand | 40g (1.5 oz.) | 16.5 x 36 in. |
| Body | 100g (3.4 oz.) | 25 x 54 in. |
| Beach | 150g (5.1 oz.) | 36 x 59 in. |
PackTowel Personal versus Ultralight
The Personal PackTowl has more polyester and less nylon than the Ultralight PackTowel. The Personal Towel is 80%/20% polyester to nylon, while the Ultralight Towel is 70%/30% polyester to nylon. This makes it lighter for a given size of towel.
Further, the Ultralight PackTowel may dry marginally faster than the Personal PackTowel. 80% faster than a similar sized cotton towel, versus 70% faster. There’s probably no practical difference there though.
The Ultralight towels are quite a bit lighter. For my hand sized towel, the Ultralight is 50% lighter. However, both towels absorb about 4 times their weight in water. So naturally the Ultralight towel is only going to take up about 1/2 of the water the Personal Towel would, for a given dimension of towel. Because of this inefficiency, you’d need to use a larger Ultralight PackTowel to tackle the same amount of water as a smaller Personal Towel, especially when that water load gets near the towel’s maximum absorption.
Like I mentioned above, the Hand sized Personal towel can dry me off, head to foot, after a shower. To get that same effort out of the Ultralight series, you’d probably need to buy the bigger, Body sized towel.
Ease of Use
Because of its ability to absorb a lot of water for its size, my towel is a lot smaller than a comparable traditional towel. This makes it easy to stow in a pack, in that it is light, and takes up very little room. My Hand sized towel weighs less than 1/5th of a pound!
Because of its antimicrobial treatment, you can even throw it in a Ziploc baggy when its wet, on the trail, and not have to worry about mold or mildew, when you get to your hiking destination, and hang it up to dry. Been there, done that, on the wet Yosemite Mist Trail.
The snap button for the hanging loop is easy to actuate, and their is even a tab there, that instructs you to ‘pull here’, so you know your pulling the assembly apart from the correct side.
The quick drying feature lets me hang the towel for an hour or two to get it dry, and ready to once again stow away. Used it camping at Lake Arrowhead the other day and it performed as expected.
Related: Here’s what I use to shower at camp: The Sea To Summit Pocket Shower. Check out the link for my full review of this handy backpacking solar shower.
Quality and Durability
There are no signs of fraying, material thinning, or pilling thus far on my PackTowel towel. However keep in mind I’ve only used it for a handful of hiking ventures and a couple camping trips.
I’d say the weakest spot on the towel is the material that the loop is made out of: some type of thin, polyester woven material, of low denier. But even if it fails at some point, this doesn’t stop the towel from functioning.
Further Reading
Thanks for checking out my PackTowel Personal towel review! Next check out my camping gear page for more ideas on what to bring when getting out there.