For a joke outfit I bought an $18 button-down online that has been one of my most reliable hiking layers for nearly a decade. This is why it outperforms more expensive pieces.
Yes, I know how scary it looks. (Photo: Adam Roy)
Updated July 8, 2026 10:56 am
If we’re going to talk about the shirt, we have to start with the picture.
I’m standing in front of a white wall wearing a button-down wool shirt in a classic lumberjack-style red and black plaid pattern. On my head, I’m wearing a rubber Chihuahua mask, black with a hint of brown, with two unblinking plastic eyes attached to it. In my arms, I’m cradling my dog, Hobbs, an actual, 5-pound Chihuahua, who is wearing a jacket in the same plaid pattern as my shirt and is staring into the middle distance with his ears cocked to the front of his head. If I’m being generous, it has the grainy quality of a strange long-lost family photograph; If I’m not, it looks like someone mailed the snapshot to the newspaper with a cut-and-paste note that begins “Publish this tomorrow or I’ll start killing again.”
The idea was innocent enough: I wanted to make a matching outfit for my chihuahua, Hobbs. I bought a rubber chihuahua mask that almost matched my mutt’s facial structure. Hobbs, a dog built for the warmest climates, already had a plaid coat to protect him from the cold in Colorado winters. I scrolled through Amazon until I found the perfect layer to complement it, a red and black synthetic fleece button-down from Wrangler, on sale for $18.
I soon realized the disadvantage of pairing costumes with your dog, which is that it only makes sense if you can bring the dog. I spent about five minutes at my office Halloween party before I decided it would be better to take off my mask than to walk out and confuse all my coworkers by wearing a rubber dog face. When I got home, I threw it in a drawer and greeted the rookies in my street clothes. I haven’t seen my Chihuahua disguise since.
However, the shirt remained hanging in my closet, getting occasional use on laundry days, until the first major snowfall of the season covered the Denver metro area in fresh powder and inspired me to grab my Nordic skis and head to our local park. I don’t remember why I decided to grab this instead of one of the dozens of technical middlelayers I own; I was probably planning on working in a café after that and didn’t want to look like a fool. I buttoned it under the windshield and drove away.
Surprisingly, that cheap button-up has maintained its dominance. In motion, it breathed well; The thick fleece kept me comfortable when I stopped to check my messages. The fit hit a happy medium, not too tight or too boxy. Over the next few months, I found myself putting more effort into it. I put it under a shell for mid-winter ski days (and apres); I wore it on backpacking trips in the early spring, and threw it on for sitting around the campfire on summer nights. Even with piles of grid-wool and lightweight insulated layers in my wardrobe, I kept choosing that lumberjack shirt.
Herein lies the trick with hiking clothes: once you get past the fancy fabrics, down fill power ratings, and DWR coatings, you have to love wearing them. I think we’ve forgotten that throughout history, when the main purpose of hiking was to get us to places we needed to go, people have traveled on foot in their everyday clothes. And while I wouldn’t recommend hitting the trail in jeans — tried it, sounds like it’s a good idea until it rains — I’ve found many of my pieces in Goodwill racks and lost-and-found boxes like the ones I’ve bought at REI. While the Wrangler shirt wasn’t the absolute warmest, most breathable, or lightest of the bunch, it was by far the most comfortable, and good enough at everything else to earn its place in my pack.
In the nearly seven years since, I’ve worn, lost, or retired more shirts, jackets, and midlayers than I can remember. It seems that Hobbs – now quite gray – has mostly forgiven me for giving him props for his Halloween getup. But that cheap plaid button-up still has regular use; In the past year, I’ve taken it on fall foliage hikes, ski tours, and a week-long rafting trip Nahanni National Park in the Northwest Territories . It’s the longest dress I’ve ever worn—and for $18, it’s not a bad deal.
