Big Country Outdoors

A sleeping bag is absolutely the primary and most essential bits of camping gear you need to have , if camping outdoors , trekking or tramping the countryside are recreations you plan to get involved with .

A decent sleeping bag is far warmer than a blanket or even two blankets prevents your natural body warmth from being leached away from you while you try to sleep. It provides you with a good, effective layer of insulation all around you. This traps pockets of warm air around your body, so you can sleep toasty warm.

If you ignore the outward appearance of various sleeping bag types , the real differences between sleeping bags come about through their size, shape and the insulating materials inside them which trap and hold your body warmth around you.

Common sizes for sleeping bags would include normal-sized sleeping bags, extra large sleeping bags for big heavy people and extra tall people, double sleeping bags for loving couples , and kids sleeping bags designed for adolescents, teenagers or even babies. These kids sleeping bags can be bought in superhero designs or with girly pictures like fairies or teddy bears. You can also buy bags with nursery motifs to suit either gender and every possible taste.

Apart from the two- people sleeping bags and kiddie’s sleeping bags, your average l sized sleeping bags for adults are built in two different shapes; the square-shape sleeping bag or the mummy-type camping sleeping bag.

Rectangular-shaped sleeping bags of the cheapest and the least efficient at saving your body heat and keeping you warm at night. Their one advantage is that you can unzip them all round , which turns them into a nice duvet or bed-cover you can throw over your bed at home. A sleeping bag at home will be much warmer than a single blanket.

Mummy shaped sleeping bags become narrower as they taper down from your hips to your feet. This conserves the maximum amount of body heat for you and keeps you warmer. The better of the mummy sleeping bags also have a quilted hood to minimize heat loss from your head, and some mummy bags are tight at the legs but leave plenty of room for your feet and toes so they do not feel cramped.

Sleeping bag insulation material can be natural or synthetic. The best natural sleeping bag filling is goose down. Down is the tiny, fluffy feathers underneath the bird’s larger feathers that keep it warm in the coldest conditions on earth. Down sleeping bags also lighter, and crumple up much smaller for packing then synthetic sleeping bags. The one bad thing about down bags is if they get wet the down feathers clump together and lose their loft. (Loft is the ability to trap warm air.) And therefore they went down sleeping bag cannot keep you warm until it is completely dried out again.

Synthetic sleeping bags are bulkier and heavier than down sleeping bags, and they have to be rolled up for packing because they cannot be compressed . However, if you do not plan on hiking or backpacking your sleeping bag and other camping paraphanalia , then a good -quality synthetic sleeping bag should do you fine. Just do not make do with a cheap one . You will be sure to regret it. You can expect to wake up in the middle of the night unable to sleep because of the cold ; and that is an awful experience I would not wish upon you .

You also need to know that , there are temparature ratings of sleeping bags which are supposed to indicate how will warm they will keep you when you are sleeping out under different conditions. Unfortunately, there is no standardized measure between manufacturers, and some people feel the cold much more than others, which makes it impractical for anybody to measure a sleeping bag accurately for everyone. So to make things easy , let me tell you that there are three-season sleeping bags, four-season sleeping bags and all the others.

Four season camping sleeping bags are supposed to give you the most insulation of all… i.e. summer, fall, winter and spring. Three season bags are rated for spring, summer and fall — but not for winter conditions. Cheap sleeping bags are normally only good for the warmest of conditions, and I strongly advise you not to waste your money on them if you ever plan on using them to camp outside. But they’d be fine for a sleep-over inside someone’s home, at a youth hostel or a for few nights in a trailer or an RV .