January 27 Sleeping system
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Trying to have a life while getting ready for the PCT is a challenge! Yeah, yeah, we are retired, but to be real, we are now spending way more hours volunteering in various capacities than we ever did at work while we were working. One of our biggest commitments, which takes quite a bit of our time each week, is being “Commanders’ of an Awana Club for kids. Most Awana Commanders are pretty much just in administration, but in our club, Bill and I wear a lot of hats.
In case you wonder what Awana is, well, it’s an international (over 150 countries), nondenominational Christian club for kids ages 3-18. Our club meets for a couple of hours a week during the school year. The kids memorize a lot of stuff from the Bible, play games, sing and hear stories/skits/puppet shows, etc. The older kids are “leaders in training”, learning how to teach the younger kids. The kids also go to competitions, where they are up against other Awana clubs in Bible Quizzing (that’s, obviously, a Bible memory and knowledge competition) and AwanaGames (an athletic competition). The cool thing about Awana is that it trains not only kids’ minds and hearts to love and serve God, but also trains their bodies to be strong and fast and healthy. Our Awana club competes with clubs from all over Northern California and Nevada, and we usually come out at or near the top.
Yesterday was “Awana day” and I was not only setting everything up (takes a couple of hours to do that), but leading a “Council Time” for all the kids, coaching our junior high Bible Quiz/AwanaGames team, our “Sparks” (K-2nd grade) Games team, our “T & T” (3rd-6th grade) Games team, and finally, coaching a high school AwanaGames team. All in one day. Whew. I didn’t get home till after 9 pm. And that’s a pretty typical day for me. Which is why I don’t always get around to putting up another blog post!
After a day like yesterday, I need a good night’s sleep, which brings me to my “subject” of sleeping systems for the PCT.
Bill and I did a lot of hemming and hawing before we did the PCT in 2005, over what sleep system to use. Should I make us a Ray Jardine-style quilt? Or should we take sleeping bags–if so, should they be down or synthetic? What “degree” level should we go for? (32 degrees? More? Less?) Finally we reached these conclusions:
1) Our usual carcamping method is to zip two sleeping bags together. We learned from this that Bill is a tosser ‘n turner, which means that a lot of cold air comes racing in every time he tosses. Brrrr for me, Monty. I tend to burrow deep down into the sleeping bag, tucking it around myself, while Bill likes it loose, with more “air”.
2) Bill (typical for guys), sleeps “hot”. It can be fairly cold outside, and he is unzipping his side of the sleeping bag and trying to cool off. Monty (me), on the other hand (typical for gals) am often cold at night. (I joke that Bill is my “hot water bottle”!) We had been on some backpacking trips where all this made for a somewhat uncomfortable night, where neither of us got the sleep we needed.
So that led to our first conclusion: We will need all the good night’s sleeps we can get on the PCT, so we’d better go for separate sleeping bags.
At that point, we were looking at down vs. synthetic. Down won. It is WAY lighter, and very comfortable and warm. Some of the people we talked to said, “No, no, you can’t do that! Only people with TENTS should use down. You are using a tarp, so you should use synthetic, in case you get caught in a bad rainstorm and the tarp doesn’t keep you dry.” Well, our experience with tents had shown us that tents are nasty, wet, damp places, and a tarp is DRYER. So we hung tough on using down, and that’s what we got.
My sleeping bag has no zippers and no hood. It’s just a tapered, narrower rectangle shape. It is long enough for me to burrow into. It has lots of down at the foot. Ahhh, warmness for my tired feet! It weighs 32 oz. And sorry, it’s a closeout. Nobody makes it anymore. Bill’s bag does have a zipper, so he can open it up when he gets hot. It weighs 27 oz. and it’s made by Mountain Hardware.
To keep our sleeping bags at their best, every day (weather permitting) when we stop for our noon break, we take the sleeping bags out of their stuff sacks and air them in the sun. During that time, my job is to cook dinner, and Bill’s job is every few minutes to turn and fluff the sleeping bags, turning them inside out and rightside out, and flipping them like pancakes, till they get totally warm and dry and fluffy. This makes them weigh less! If you don’t air your sleeping bags, they get heavier and heavier with your own moisture that evaporates off you in the night.
Then at night, once the ground cloth is down ( and if needed, the tarp is up), the next item of business is for me to roll out my 3/4 length Ridgerest , while Bill puts out his Gossamer Gear sleeping pad (I call it his “doormat”, because that’s what it looks like), get out the sleeping bags and fluff them and let them “re-aerate” while we do other things like “washing up”, changing into sleeping clothes, etc. I use a Ridgerest, because it does such a great job of insulating me from the cold ground. Bill doesn’t mind cold ground, and he likes the idea that his doormat only weighs 3.5 oz. Neither of us would ever consider Thermarest. Waaaaaay too heavy.
The other part of our sleep system is our sleeping CLOTHES. To stay warm enough in such lightweight bags, we carry silk longjohns (separate top and bottom) that weigh 3 oz. for each “piece.” Our “silkies” as we call them, are fine for all but the coldest nights. Personally, I also add a pair of clean, lightweight wool “sleeping socks” since my feet get cold easily without them. The silkies travel in the stuff sacks with the sleeping bags while we are hiking.
When it gets REEEEALLY cold, we start adding things. Besides the silkies, we put on a polyester longsleeved top (known by many hikers as “polyphews” because polyester can get pretty stinky from sweat), and wear a fleece hat and mittens. To keep my legs warm, I occasionally added my fleece jacket, draped over my legs inside the sleeping bag. Only twice on our entire 2005 hike did I need to WEAR my fleece jacket inside the sleeping bag at night, and I also snuggled up right against Bill–he still makes a good hot water bottle.
Words are not adequate to express the wondrous feeling of putting on CLEAN silkies with CLEAN socks and sliding into a soft, warm down sleeping bag at the end of the day. Man, does it feel good! I’d put on my headlamp and write notes in my journal and just relish the wonderful feeling before turning off the headlamp and calling it a day.
What made you decide not to go with Ray’s quilt? I’m looking at going that route but still considering.
You know, if you are hiking ALONE and sleeping ALONE, I think Ray’s quilt would be a great idea. The problem is trying to stay warm when there’s TWO people. Even Ray Jardine had to add an extra piece to the top edge of his quilt to try to solve the problem of keeping TWO sets of shoulders warm when one of them turns over and thus lifts the top edge of the quilt. It was this problem that finally led Bill and I into using two sleeping bags instead. I have trouble with getting cold at night, and the constant draft of cold air coming in left me very sleepless and tired in the morning. But if I had a Ray Jardine quilt all to myself, I think that would be great.
Another nice thing about a quilt is that it’s easier to air it and keep it fluffy.
Another possibility is that I know some of the sleeping bag companies are making what’s called “top bags”, meaning that they only have down or other warm fluffy stuff on the TOP of the bag, and just a layer of fabric underneath you. That’s basically what Ray Jardine’s quilt does. And if you make your own quilt, following Ray’s instructions, it is WAY, WAY cheaper than a manufactured “top bag.”
Thanks, those are good points. I will be sleeping alone, but not under my own tarp, I’m going to share it with my buddy. I decided on the quilt and probably sewing my own bug net bivy…
Right, definitely share the tarp! In a number of places along the PCT, there’s not much level ground for a campsite. If you and your buddy had totally separate tarps, you’d probably end up camped rather far apart.
When you make your bug bivy, I would advise making the “head” end of it big enough for you to sit up. That way you can clean up, change clothes, whatever, in PEACE. Trust me, the mosquitoes get SERIOUSLY bad in some places!
Great post! We’re second-guessing ourselves over many of the same sleep systems questions. We came to similar conclusions: her RR, him GG “doormat”, but zipped-together bags. See you out there!
Tradja & Jessie
PCT 2010
Hey, will you guys be at ADZPCTKO? Thanks for the comment! The idea of zipping bags together is what we do when we’re carcamping and don’t care about sleeping bag weight, but on the PCT, our bags don’t have zippers (too heavy) so we can’t zip together. Plus there’s the problem that Bill easily gets hot, while I easily get cold. So it’s nice when we are able to stay for a night in town, in a bed. Much more fun!
I am just reading Ray’s new book “trail life”. He talks about how if down gets wet it is very dangerous and it happened to him on each pct. Just wondering if your down sleeping bags ever failed you on your last pct?
Our down bags only got wet once when we did the PCT in 2005, and that was when we were hit with the scariest storm I have ever experienced. We had left Tehachapi, and were about a day’s hike, plus a bit, from Kennedy Meadows. We spent hours and hours in the middle of the night being absolutely pummelled by heavy rain. The wind was awful–it broke the tops off the trees around us. We had simply staked down our tarp as usual, with stakes in the ground, and the wind literally ripped the stakes right out of the ground, so there we were, in the pitchblack night, lit up regularly by lightning, fighting to get our tarp up again. Well, to be accurate, BILL was out in the pouring rain, fighting to get the tarp up again. I was trying to keep the down sleeping bags from getting soaked. I only partially succeeded. We spent the rest of the night huddled in wet bags, waiting for some faint morning light so we could get up and get moving. It was uncomfortable, but I would not call it dangerous. As soon as we could, we hit the trail, and were soon nice and warm just from hiking. To dry our very wet sleeping bags, we did use Ray’s system of just draping them over us as we hiked (like a kingly mantle) and every now and then, we flipped them over, turned them other-side-out, etc. till they were nice and dry.
The only other time my sleeping bag got wet, it only got wet at the foot, and that was because we’d been hiking in the rain all day, and that night, when I put my pack down under the foot of the tarp as usual, I didn’t drape a piece of plastic over it to keep the wet pack from wetting the foot of my sleeping bag. So I got cold wet feet that night instead of warm, dry ones.
Ray does have a good point, and I know that since we use a tarp, we are taking a bit of a risk with down bags, but the savings in weight is worth it!
You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree with your blog.