What LaCrosse actually publishes
The Grange in this configuration is an 18-inch, hand-laid natural rubber boot in LaCrosse’s ZXT compound, uninsulated, in a plain dark finish. Three facts matter and everything below is an argument about what each one means in the woods: the rubber is natural rather than synthetic, the upper is 18 inches, and there is no insulation in this model.
Natural rubber, and why it is the whole point
Your boots are the only piece of gear in continuous contact with ground a deer will later put its nose on. Leather absorbs sweat and releases it along your entire entry route; a sealed rubber boot does not. Natural rubber compounds are also relatively neutral in their own right, where some cheap synthetics carry a manufacturing smell of their own for the first season.
On pressured whitetail ground — small properties, public land with a walked-in entry route, anywhere deer regularly cross the trail you use — that is a real and cheap advantage. Keep it in proportion: your boots are one scent input and the wind dominates all of them. But it is the input you can eliminate for the price of a boot you needed anyway.
Eighteen inches is a decision, not a size
The 18-inch upper is what makes this boot stop being a decision in the field. Creek crossings, flooded timber, marsh edge, standing water in a bean field after a week of rain — you walk through it rather than around it. Hunters who move to a tall rubber boot almost always say the same thing: they stopped route-planning around water.
The cost is weight and heat. A tall boot carries more rubber up your calf, and rubber does not breathe, so a warm walk in a tall boot arrives with a damper foot than a shorter one would. If you never cross water and hunt dry upland ground, a shorter rubber boot is genuinely the better buy and this is not the model to want.
Uninsulated, and this is where people get it wrong
This is the spec most often misread on this boot. The Grange in this model has no insulation. Rubber alone is not warm; it is a barrier, not a thermal layer. Once temperatures approach freezing and you sit still, an uninsulated rubber boot gets cold, and it gets cold faster than an uninsulated leather boot because there is no breathability to move the sweat out.
That does not make it a bad boot. It makes it an early-season and mild-weather boot, which is exactly what a great many hunters actually need most of the time. Sitting a 25-degree December all-day sit in these, then blaming the boot, is a fitting error rather than a product defect — and it is why we rank insulated boots separately.
Where it is genuinely beaten
An honest review names the losses. Three of them here are structural, not fixable by a newer model.
Walking distance. Like every rubber boot, the Grange is a straight-sided tube. There is no fitted heel counter, so your heel lifts with every step, and that is the mechanism that produces blisters over distance. Rubber boots with an added steel shank walk noticeably better on uneven ground, and if your access is a mile of side-hill, that feature is worth more to you than the scent advantage. Our rubber vs leather comparison is the honest version of that decision.
Warmth per dollar. Insulated rubber boots from the budget brands deliver far more warmth for the money than this boot plus heavy socks ever will. If cold sits are the bulk of your season, buy insulation directly rather than trying to layer your way to it.
Fit precision. Rubber boots are sold in whole sizes and generous shapes; you fit around them with socks rather than fitting them to your foot. If you have a narrow foot or a high instep, that is a compromise you will feel every hunt, and no break-in period changes it.
Three hunters who should buy something else
- The hunter walking real miles. Over a mile, especially uphill, a fitted leather boot will cost you less in blisters and ankles than this saves you in scent.
- The late-season sitter. If most of your hunting is static and below freezing, buy an insulated boot and stop trying to solve it with socks.
- The dry-ground upland hunter. If you never cross water, you are carrying 18 inches of rubber for no return. A shorter boot or a leather boot is lighter and cooler.
Making it last
Rubber boots do not usually wear out from use; they die from storage. Heat, direct sunlight and ozone all degrade natural rubber, and the failure shows up as a crack at the ankle flex point that cannot be repaired. A pair left in the bed of a truck through a southern summer can be finished before the season opens.
Keep them somewhere cool and dark, rinse mud off rather than letting it dry on and abrade the surface, dry them out of direct sun and away from a heat source, and store them upright rather than folded over at the ankle. That is the entire maintenance routine, it costs nothing, and it roughly doubles the working life of the boot.
The verdict
Buy it if you hunt whitetail from stands or blinds inside about a mile of the truck, cross water on the way in, and your season is mostly early and mid-season rather than the deep cold. In that lane it does something no leather boot can do, at a price that has stayed reasonable for decades, and it does not ask you to compromise anywhere that matters for that hunt.
Do not buy it as your only boot if you cover distance, hunt steep ground, or sit still in freezing weather. It is a specialist that happens to be cheap, not an all-rounder — and buying it as an all-rounder is how it gets a bad reputation it does not deserve.
