The most effective days in life appear to start out in a sleeping bag. Certain, you get up sheathed in slick nylon, staring up at a wall fabricated from extra nylon, however when you escape your shiny sleep jail, you’re often someplace superb—the Excessive Sierra, lakeside on Superior, in a tree home in Laos.
I’ve by no means been keen on the sleeping bag half, although. Fortuitously I’m not the one one who feels this fashion. The designers behind the Zenbivy sleep system got here up with an answer: a modular sleeping system that’s one half sleeping bag, one half Grandma’s quilt, and simply concerning the good technique to sleep outdoor.
It’s Actually That Good
The web is full of superlative critiques of the Zenbivy. It’s nearly universally praised with feedback prefer it’s “the perfect sleep I’ve ever had within the backcountry.” I’ll confess, this made me skeptical. At this level, each time I see one thing universally praised I assume that reward is being paid for by the corporate.
Besides with Zenbivy, influencers aren’t those praising it; it’s precise customers on Reddit {and professional} reviewers I belief. Having now spent a number of weeks within the Zenbivy, I’m right here to affix them. The 25-degree model of the Zenbivy authentic ed is the perfect sleep I’ve had within the backcountry, in a tent, and presumably wherever else.
I is perhaps divorced and disowned if I go away my spouse and youngsters to spend extra nights within the Zenbivy sleeping bag. Fortuitously, I despatched it again to Zenbivy earlier than it turned a problem. However I miss it. I need one. I’ll by no means go backpacking with out one once more.
Let’s begin with what makes the Zenbivy system so nice: It’s a sleeping bag, it’s a quilt, it’s a sheet, and it’s a number of issues in between, because of its modularity.
{Photograph}: Zenbivy
There are a number of completely different Zenbivy techniques. I examined the entire Zenbivy Mattress, which makes use of a two-piece quilt and sheet design frequent to all their techniques, but additionally features a sleeping pad, pillow, and dry bag with compression straps. Whereas the extras are good to have, the core genius of the system is the fitted sheet and zippered quilt combo.
The Zenbivy system works by wrapping a fitted sheet over your sleeping pad. The sheet additionally has the hood portion of the sleeping bag hooked up to it. Then you definately lay the highest quilt over that. That is the good, loosest means to make use of the system and the way I did most of my testing since I sleep moderately heat. Nonetheless, ought to the temperature drop, you possibly can zip the quilt footbox up right into a mummy bag configuration and zip the higher sides to the underside sheet. I did this on a few cooler nights within the Keweenaw Peninsula when it received fairly frigid.
More often than not, I slept in quilt mode. As a result of the hood of the bag is a part of the underside sheet, you possibly can maintain fairly heat even in case you don’t zip up the bag. It additionally eliminates the necessity to sleep in a hat, which I’ve by no means appreciated.
