The Outdoor Adventure Giving you tips, tricks & recommendations to help make adventuring in the Outdoors fun, safe & exciting for you and your kids.
For the next little while I’m down in South America and I didn’t bring a sleeping bag. I don’t want to buy a new one down here if I don’t have to, so in typical DIY fashion I decided to work with what I have: A closed cell foam sleeping pad and an emergency blanket.
The biggest thing I was worried about was the fact that mylar blankets, being so light, tend to let the warm air out the gaps. Yes they insulate to 90%, but that’s if the are tucked in nice and snugly. I decided to take a hint from ultralight backpacking. To shave off a few more ounces, several companies make sleeping bags that are open on the back (because any part of the bag that you lie on doesn’t insulate very well anyway). They use the sleeping pad inside the quilt by using strings or thin fabric on the back of the “ultralight quilt” and voila! I decided to put that to work.
I tried it out at 10 500 feet where the temperature got down to 3 degrees C (40 degrees F). That was to cold, but down to 50 degrees F(10 C) it was quite comfy. 7 degrees Celsius is probably the limit. All told it weighed 2 oz for the blanket system and 7 oz for the mat.
Here’s the materials list:
- One closed cell foam sleeping pad
- 1 roll of tuck or packing tape
- 10 feet of string cut into 18 inch lengths
- 1 emergency blanket
