The “Non-Sleeping Bag” Sleeping Bag
Some innovations are so basic and obvious you wonder why you didn’t come up with them yourself. Suitcases with telescoping handles, for example. Daily pill sorters. Ketchup bottles that sit on their heads. The cardboard coffee-cup sleeve. These ideas are funding peoples’ retirements, and given the simplicity of the ideas, those retirements might not belong to career engineers or entrepreneurs.
The latest innovation that’s left me wondering if I was just one sleep away from coming up with it is the backpacking quilt.
Quilt” in this case feels like a misnomer. This quilt bears no semblance to the patchwork covering your grandmother might have sewn. Backpacking quilts are no longer all that new on the outdoor gear market; they’ve been quietly sold for more than a decade now. But I was just turned onto these ultralight beauties a few years ago, and, speaking as a casual outdoors gearhead, I don’t think they’ve yet received the love they deserve.
Now, when it comes to sleeping, I do run warm. That’s not much of a confession coming from a middle-aged male. It’s fairly well documented that the ambient body temperature of men runs, on average, several degrees warmer than that of women. Alas, most workplace thermostats are set near 70oF – traditionally a comfortable setting for men – whereas many women feel and work better at a temperature closer to 75oF. This won’t come as news to any woman who’s worn a jacket or blanket at work while her male counterparts are rocking the golf shirts.
So I absolutely commiserate when I’m in the office. On the trail, though, it’s everyone for themselves, especially when we’re talking about a good night’s sleep.
Years ago, my wife and I purchased a set of four lightly-used sleeping bags from the University of Minnesota Outdoor Adventure Club. These sacks served as a solid, cost-effective way of ensuring our outdoors sleeping needs would be covered for years to come. Purchased new, these bags would have run $300 apiece, and as parents to two young children we had no shortage of other things to spend our money on in those days. Two of the sleeping bags were rated to 30oF, and the other two went all the way down to 0oF – ideal for the two females in the family who came with with female thermostats.
But this triumphant purchase didn’t solve every problem: Even the 30o rated bags were too warm for my tender overnight needs. During a standard spring or summer night, I would sweat myself insane trying to fall asleep. One of the joys of outdoor adventures involves being open to nature’s whims, but when you’re stuck in a stifling tent (or let’s face it, even just a few degrees above cozy), this joy yields to a sense of helplessness. Add in how I sleep most nights at home with my bare feet poking out from under the covers, and there in my mummy sack I had myself an altogether sticky situation.
Often I would unzip my entire bag and drape it over me, occasionally waking up to the shock of a cold metal zipper brushing against my leg. This was less of a problem at drive-up campgrounds – I could forgo a sleeping bag for a blanket or just a bedsheet – but those options weren’t suitable for backpacking, where the former would be too big to pack and the latter insufficient for nippier nights.
After a decade and a half of these struggles, I decided it was time to invest once again in a new sleep solution. Gear technology had come a long way in those years, and Cristina and I still had many more outdoors adventures worth investing in. So, feverish researcher that I am, and armed with a decent sum of birthday cash socked away, I called on Google to seek its wisdom.
One of the first resources I landed on was a site called Switch Back Travel. Switch Back Travel published an annual list of sleeping bag rankings, and this year’s was structured around some pretty logical categories: Best Overall, Most Comfortable for Side Sleepers, Best Budget Sleeping Bag, and so on.
And there at the bottom of the list – positioned almost as an afterthought – was a category I’d never encountered before: Best Sleeping Quilt for Backpacking.
What’s this? A quilt? Was this an entirely new sleep concept – one that had never previously crossed my awareness? Scrolling further, I learned that this was a relatively recent development, a taxonomy of overnight gear that basically blew open the sleeping bag.
What I learned was that a backpacking quilt differs from a sleeping bag in several important respects. First and most prominently, it does away with the zipper altogether, instead leveraging four elastic clip-straps spaced evenly along the length of the opening. These plastic clips are much smaller and thinner than the clips on your backpack – similar in form and function to tiny push-button seatbelt buckles – because, unlike on a backpack, they’re not tasked with holding all of your earthly belongings inside.
Second, and this is no small thing for me, the foot space is open-ended. In effect, the quilt relies on sleepers to bring whatever sock game they choose to keep their feet warm versus addressing that need itself. Finally, the quilt does away with the mummy hood, once again leaving any head-coverage decisions up to the sleeper. For fans of personal responsibility, this is the sleep solution for you. The end product is a piece of gear so featherweight you might forget you packed it.
As for me, I just keep coming back to…why didn’t I think of this? It’s brilliant and so damn simple. For years, I’d basically been contorting my sleeping bag to act like one of these down-filled gifts from above.
You may find yourself wondering, hey, sounds great, but isn’t this maybe a little too minimalist? Doesn’t it get drafty? It might be perfect at 10pm – but what about those truly frigid hours around 4am?
I’ll try to explain, using a few late-night snacks as illustration.
When it’s still warm out, especially if you’re a back sleeper, you can put it into what I call the taco position. This means the quilt is centered on your sleeping pad, with the open seam directly on top of you. You can leave all four clips snapped shut and simply use the gaps between as a smokestack, letting heat rise to escape. You can unclip a couple straps and, say, let your arms roam free. Or you can keep them all unclipped for maximum thermo-control.
If it’s a bit cooler out, your quilt can instead assume the hoagie position. This involves rotating the quilt 90 degrees and shifting the open seam to your side. It’s a great position for side sleepers and people who desire full coverage but might prefer keeping a leg or two uncovered overnight. This arrangement also works well on nights when temps will transition from comfortable at lights-out to downright chilly by morning. At said time, you can simply roll another quarter-turn and spend the rest of the night lying on top of the open seam.
What you find yourself in then is the position I refer to as the burrito position. It’s the one that most resembles that of a traditional sleeping bag. Your body weight is trapping most drafts because the open gap is underneath you, closed against the sleeping pad. And unless you’re the proverbial Princess who battled the Pea, the straps and plastic clips you’re sleeping on top of are virtually imperceptible – certainly less bracing than the untimely brush of a cold zipper.
Finally, if that still sounds too drafty, you can create the ultimate quilt experience by expanding the straps and sliding your entire sleeping pad inside the cocoon. (Three-layer burrito position, perhaps?) This approach completely seals off the main gap and likely the foot opening as well. At this point, all that stands between you and the traditional sleeping bag experience is the mummy hood, which is easily replicated by a stocking hat and a sweatshirt. If you need more coverage than that, you’re probably opting for the mummy sack over the quilt in the first place.
Among distance backpackers, quilts have been gaining in popularity due to both their weight and their versatility. You can shed up to a full pound compared to a sleeping bag thanks to its decreased material and hardware, and it’s basic enough that you can even skip the stuffsack altogether, opting instead to snake it around the clothing and gear in your backpack. Experienced backpackers are often perfectly happy sleeping in regular clothes overnight anyway, and they’re savvy enough to know when conditions will call for packing more insulation than a quilt provides.
The Nerf football. Urinal splashguards. Does the backpacking quilt rate with these innovations? In my mind, no question. It turns out that for folks like me, the best sleeping bag isn’t actually a bag at all.
© Erik Lien
Erik Lien 
Share your thoughts