I didn’t realize until recently that you could buy a sleeping bag for $10 — and apparently a pretty decent one at that.
I made the discovery when buying sleeping bags to hand out to homeless people in New Orleans along with other members of Enterprise Baptist Church, Liberty.
I first ordered some compact, lightweight fleece sleeping bags for $16 each. I’ve used such a bag for years in warm climates and love it. Rolled up, they’re about the size of a football and thus easy to carry.
I figured if I was homeless in New Orleans, that’s what I would want.
But I also had a $100 gift card for Academy Sports & Outdoors store, which my son and daughter-in-law gave me last Christmas. Since we don’t have an Academy around here and I’m rarely in a place where there is one, I didn’t get around to using the card until a recent trip to the Coast.
I already have about all the outdoor equipment I could ever need, so I figured I’d use the gift card for the church trip. I thought maybe it would buy two or three sleeping bags.
To my surprise there were plenty that cost $10. They were relatively compact and rated to 45 degrees (which means they’d be comfortable down to 55 in reality).
I also got a few polyester sleeping bag liners, about the size of a potato when rolled up, for people who didn’t want to tote a full sleeping bag around.
In all we handed out 83 sleeping bags, and the folks we met were thrilled to get them.
Canvas and flannel
All this got me to thinking about how sleeping bags have changed over the years.
When I was a kid, they were made of cotton duck (canvas) on the outside and flannel on the inside (usually with pictures of bears, moose or such). They were great for camping out in the back yard or nearby woods with friends.
As I got older and took on bigger challenges, I needed a better bag. When a friend and I went camping in icy conditions, I borrowed an Army-issue mountain bag from a buddy who had been in the service. It was a mummy bag stuffed with feathers, and I think I’d have frozen to death if I hadn’t had two dogs I could cram inside with me.
My older brother Robert, meanwhile, who was a hardcore backpacker, shelled out big bucks for a top-of-the-line goose-down mummy bag.
Inspired but less willing to spend the money, I opted for a Sears down bag endorsed by Sir Edmund Hillary of Mount Everest fame. It was stuffed with duck down — inferior to goose down — and not much better than the Army bag.
Many more options
Later I got a bag insulated with Hollofil 808 — “pound for pound, warmer than down!” as the catalog put it. I discovered not only was that blatantly untrue, Hollofil 808 didn’t compress, so the bag was enormous.
I stepped up to Hollofil II, which did compress, and at last I was able to sleep comfortably when camping in cold weather. I liked the modified mummy design better than full mummy since it gives you more room.
I also found that a sleeping pad not only adds to your comfort but keeps your heat from seeping away into the ground.
Another key factor in a good sleeping bag is a sturdy zipper that doesn’t break or snag. The last thing you want to do is struggle with a hung-up sleeping bag zipper at 3 in the morning.
I never did go top-of-the-line like my brother, but I did learn to find a middle road of good quality for a reasonable price.
Nowadays you can easily find a good, warm bag for under $100 — though, as the homeless folks we met demonstrated, a $10 bag is fine if that’s all you can get.
