The Bedding In Your Backpack
It has been a long day. Climbing up the mountain with the heavy backpack, as the sun slides down the mountain side, weariness sets in. The sight of the camping site sends you a new burst of energy. There is the hot dinner waiting for you and hopefully a hot water bath. The thought of finally laying your legs to rest, sliding into the sleeping bag and falling off to sleep in the comfortable warmth and confines of the sleeping bag is overwhelming. There are the countless stars to watch over you and the cool winds to nuzzle you into a dreamy night.
It is not practical to carry with you a bed when you go camping, trekking, hiking or mountaineering. A sleeping bag is an improvised bed for you to sleep in designed to be carried by you wherever you go. It is a protective bag resembling a blanket with a zipper. It provides the softness of a bed with the soft padding. It keeps you warm with its thermal insulation. There are two types of sleeping bag. The first is the one that looks like a blanket fitted with, on one side or on both side, with a zipper. This can be folded, rolled up and bound with cords or straps and carried in your backpack. The second is the mummy bag as it resembles a mummy. It is broad on the head side and tapers as it goes to the leg side. But this cannot be folded nor can it be easily rolled. It is better stuffed into the compression sack or the stuff sack and carried in your backpack.
There are different sleeping bags in the market which have different capacities to withstand water and come with different insulation capacities. The Marmot Hydrogen sleeping bag keeps you warm down to about 30 Fahrenheit.
The sleeping bags have different capacities in its water absorption capacity, insulation capacity and heat retention capacity. The insulation is faster with the synthetic fill sleeping bag and it is warm even when the bag is wet. Its disadvantage is that it is not easily compressed and so takes up more space in the backpack. The lighter down fill bag though having lesser insulation capacity is able to retain more heat.