Get a good night’s sleep and you will be well on your way to making camping a memorable experience. A comfortable night’s sleep is not dependant on your sleeping bag, mattress or groundsheet. When camping, whether in a tent or in the open under the stars, your first consideration must be your bed site. When selecting a site, damp, sloping ground, rocks and tree roots which cannot be removed, must be avoided.
The most common mistake is to select a depression, dry ravine, stream bank because it is sheltered from the afternoon wind. But winds have a habit of disappearing around dusk, turning an unfriendly promontory into an admirable camp. As the evening advances, a gentle but persistent night wind commonly rises to pour cold heavy air down the streambeds and ravines and into those inviting depressions, leaving them as much as ten degrees colder than higher ground only a few metres away.
Dry ravines, besides collecting cold air at night, also collect running water quickly in a cloudburst. Meadows tend to be damp and attract heavy dew. Dew results when moist air cools, causing fallout of condensation. Dew will be heavier near a lake, stream or meadow, and just after a storm. Be careful as the evening wears on as heavy dew is capable of severely wetting an unprotected sleeping bag in just a few hours. Woe to the wary backpacker who has to climb inside a drenched bag left open or inside out. As well as being uncomfortable, a damp sleeping bag will be heavier to carry.
There are enough advantages to sleeping beneath a tree to more than compensate for the filtered view of the stars. Trees serve as an umbrella to shield the sleeper from heavy dew and light rain. On a bitterly cold, clear night, sheltering branches serve as insulation from solar radiation. The air temperature beneath a tree may be ten degrees warmer than a bed site exposed to the chilly night sky. For the late sleeper, position the bed to the west of a good sized tree so that it can shade you from the early morning sun – at least another hour’s sleep. Trees frequently serve as windbreaks, clothes hangers, pack supports, tarp tie-downs and a source of cushioning pine-needle mattresses.
A crude but effective way to increase your sleeping bag’s warmth is to wear your clothing to bed. Ideally, wear it over thermal underwear so you stay warm without sweating. You don’t need to carry a heavy duty down bag just because the temperature might get really low. You can carry a lighter, cheaper bag and rely on the clothing you have to carry anyway to provide the other warmth capability. You can also increase the warmth of your bag by wearing a balaclava or other covering your head and face to prevent heat loss that can chill the entire body. |
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