Tour Divide riders hardly take anything to sleep in or on at all. It’s crazy. It also forces them to sleep in portable toilets along the route. Most riders take every advantage of lodging they can rather than camp and worry about pesky things like grizzly bears.
As a DNB lodging like that just isn’t sustainable. I have a lot more to haul around and even though I have a higher budget than most adventure cyclists because I’m working while traveling I still don’t want to pay 200 dollars US for a yurt. Tourist gouging is a thing. I want to support the local economy, but come on.
Also, worrying about death by hypothermia could be considered a hostile work environment.
I’ve had several years of experiences dating back by my very first days as a Cub Scout (when I once froze my ass off because I was completely ill-prepared by a clueless leader) and later to comfortably sleeping on two feet of snow (prepared extremely well by a true outdoors-man, military veteran, and avid snow-mobiler). Later, I’d help prepare hundreds of scouts and eventually paying adventure tourists. In that time, a few things seem to emerge as cardinal rules of safe, comfortable sleeping systems.
There’s a reason the main military uses the Modular Sleep System (MSS). The system needs to adapt to the conditions of any military theater. By layering pockets of air can be added to increase insulation or omitted to keep comfortable and—most importantly—to eliminate moisture from over perspiration. Sweat near the skin can kill you faster than most things when not dealt with properly. I’ve been nearly hyperthermic in 50 degree (F) weather before from not dealing with sweat build up and being subjecting to high winds.
Wearing a wicking layer to bed will always keep you warmer. It makes sure that the sweat gets away from your skin as soon as possible. It might seem counter-intuitive, but even in hot summer months I find wearing a clean ultra-lightweight wicking layer to bed helps me sleep so much better. Make sure it is clean, however, if it has a lot of salt and grime build up the wicking properties of the layer seem to stop working.
Speaking of wicking, most sleeping bag liners are designed to do exactly that in order to increase the temperature rating of other bags. Generally, people will get a liner to go with their three-season bag to turn their three-season bag into a winter bag.
During summer months an extreme fleece sleeping bag liner is almost a sleeping bag all by itself. They make the absolute best hot-summer bags since they are basically just light sheets wicking away sweat and keeping a bit of chill from directly touching your skin. Usually, you can use just a liner to sleep in during Summer months in the desert when you setup your tent. Add your wicking underwear layer for a bit more warmth and so you can get up comfortably in the middle of the night.
The sleeping bag liner is also a good hygiene thing since it absorbs the oils and sweat and can easily be washed or replaced when doing so might be harder for a sleeping bag (another reason to never buy a down sleeping bag).
When wicking long-underwear plus the liner is just too cold I jump quickly into a travel sack sleeping bag.
A travel sack is the lightest “sleeping bag” you can buy. They are so light they are often considered liners for other bags to give them more temperature range. Combined with a fleece sleeping bag liner and a travel sack becomes a proper three-season sleeping bag. Add a good four-season tent and it will cover any condition in which typing on a laptop computer from within the tent to get work done is sustainable (as well as the occasional, unexpected winter storm when combined with a layer of puffy clothing).
Just say no to down. Down provides zero protection when it gets wet and it will get wet. In fact, there is literally no advantage to down other than being ever so slightly lighter and packing down to a smaller size, but you cannot pack a down bag forever in compressed form or it degrades. You have to have a stupid special sack just to keep the loft when not using it. But the whole point is to be using it all the time! Seriously, I feel so stupid having given into the down hype and spent way too much money on bags that I could not get rid of faster after using them for a season.
The sleeping pad is perhaps the most important piece of gear to keep you warm in all conditions. Beginners don’t realize it is the ground they need to be protected from more than the cold air. Plus, a pad can be used by itself to sleep directly on the ground under the stars and provide at least some protection from the dirt and creepy crawlies (consider wearing a mosquito net over your head if you do so you don’t end up eating a spider).
Just say no to inflatable sleeping pads. YouTube has tons of videos of people struggling to repair them, inflate them, or use them once their baffles blow out. Why? Because they think the inflatable pads are somehow easier to manage and lighter. Nothing beats foam, period.
Ultra-light weenies will tell you that a four-season tent is too heavy to carry. Then they want to come into your tent when they freeze their asses off.
I’ve learned the hard way that a four-season tent is built to do what I would expect a three-season tent to do: keep me dry. I cannot emphasize this enough. Almost all three-season tents will leak in any major rainstorm. Four-season tents are also aren’t made to keep water from entering the tent from snow or if any water puddles around the tent. It is not always easy to pick that perfect spot that will not have some ground-water flowing into the tent. Once my family and I got soaked in one of those horrible “family” tents when this big, ugly monster failed to block any water from flowing into the tent. We spent the night moving pads and bags around dodging the water. Some people will even get a cot just to keep off the floor of their tent that soaks through too easily. (A cot is still amazing for sleeping comfortably and safely under the stars.)
I have time to setup a tent. A soldier might not. But a tent, often made of the same materials as a bivy, manages wind, moisture, and body heat much better than a bivy. Anyone who has ever felt the soaked walls of their tent in the morning understands this. In places where humidity is extremely high keeping that layer of condensation as far away as possible is the difference between a comfortable morning and one wrestling around in a soggy bag. Many adventurers love to say how much they love their ultra-light bivy, but anyone honest about them will tell you they are horrible at doing the one thing you would expect: to keep you dry.
But what about sleeping under the stars?
If you are in a place where that is possible then you can either do it without a bivy, or, you can just use your tent fly as a makeshift tarp over the top of your bag like a waterproof blanket. Plus if you use a synthetic bag you can put up with a minor rain shower without any problems and still be perfectly warm—especially in the Summer months. I completely an entire season of river guiding without setting up a tent a single time. All I had was my travel sack (Summer) sleeping bag for all of it. Even the night I woke with a bit of frost on the bag in May was fine.