The “Non-Sleeping Bag” Sleeping Bag

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Some innovations are so simple and obvious in retrospect they almost reach up and bonk you in the head. Suitcases with telescoping handles, for example. The cardboard coffee-cup sleeve. Daily pill sorters. Ketchup bottles that sit on their heads. Someone’s making millions off these ideas…and you just ask yourself, why didn’t I come up with that?

The latest innovation I’ve encountered that left me rehashing the old V-8 juice commercials (bonk!) is the backpacking quilt.

Now, “quilt” in this case feels like a misnomer. It bears no resemblance to the quilts your grandmother might have sewn, and they’re not even all that new on the outdoor-gear market. Backpacking quilts have been quietly sold for more than a decade now. That said, I was just turned onto these lightweight beauties a couple years ago, and, speaking as a casual gearhead, I’m not sure they’ve yet received the love they deserve.

First, a confession: When it comes to sleeping, I run warm. And actually, 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 is, on average, several degrees warmer than that of women. It’s an unfortunate fact, too, that most workplace thermostats are set at close to 70^oF – traditionally a comfortable setting for men – while most women feel and work better at a temperature closer to 75^oF. This will not come as news to any woman who’s worn a jacket or blanket in the middle of the workday while her male counterparts are rocking the golf shirts.

I commiserate when I’m in the office. On the trail, though, it’s everyone for themselves, especially when a good night’s sleep is at stake.

Some 15 years ago, Cristina and I purchased a set of four lightly-used sleeping bags from the University of Minnesota Outdoor Adventure Club. This 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 important things to spend our money on in those days. (Like, say, wine.) Two of the sleeping bags were rated to 30^oF, and the other two went all the way down to 0^oF – ideal for the two females in the family who, naturally, were built with female thermostats.

Here was the problem for me: Even the lighter-weight bags were too warm for my tender sleeping needs. During a standard spring or summer evening, I would sweat myself silly trying to knock off. One of the joys of outdoor adventures involves being subject to nature’s whims, but when you’re stuck in a stifling tent (or honestly, even just a few degrees above cozy), this joy yields to a sense of helplessness. Add in the fact that at home, I sleep most nights with my feet poking outside the covers, and there in my mummy sack I had myself an altogether sticky situation.

Usually I would unzip my entire bag and drape it over me as a blanket, occasionally with my sleep being interrupted by a cold metal zipper rubbing against my leg. This was less of a problem when we would “car-camp” – I could forgo a sleeping bag for a blanket or even a simple bedsheet – but those options weren’t suitable for backpacking, where the former would be too heavyweight and the latter insufficient for chillier nights.

After a decade and a half of overnight struggles, I decided it was once again time to invest in a new sleep solution. No doubt gear technology had come a long way in those years, and Cristina and I still had many more adventures worth investing in. Feverish researcher that I am, and armed last year with a tidy sum of birthday cash, I called on my old friend Google to seek its advice on the best sleeping bags.

Among the resources I found was a site called Switch Back Travel. This site promoted an annual list of sleeping bag rankings, and it was broken down into some pretty logical categories: Best Overall, Most Comfortable for Side Sleepers, Best Budget Sleeping Bag, and so on. At the bottom of the list –positioned almost as an afterthought – was a category I’d never encountered before: Best Sleeping Quilt for Backpacking.

Wait, what? A quilt? Was this an entirely new sleep offering – one that had never crossed my awareness until then? Upon investigating, I learned that this was a relatively recent development, a taxonomy of overnight gear that basically blew open the sleeping bag.

What I discovered 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 covering 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 heaven above.

You may be reading this and wondering, hey, sounds great, but isn’t this maybe a little too minimalist? Doesn’t it get drafty? Maybe it’s 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 sleeping bag experience is the mummy hood, which is easily replicated by a 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 tend to be 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 doubt. Because sometimes it turns out that the best sleeping bag isn’t a bag at all.

© Erik Lien