One of the best days in life appear to start out in a sleeping bag. Positive, you get up sheathed in slick nylon, staring up at a wall product of 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 manner. 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 approach to sleep open air.
It’s Actually That Good
The web is crammed with superlative evaluations of the Zenbivy. It’s nearly universally praised with feedback prefer it’s “one of the best 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 hitch them. The 25-degree model of the Zenbivy unique ed is one of the best sleep I’ve had within the backcountry, in a tent, and probably wherever else.
I is perhaps divorced and disowned if I depart my spouse and children 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 could 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, due to its modularity.
There are a number of completely different Zenbivy techniques. I examined the whole 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 definitely lay the highest quilt over that. That is the good, loosest approach to make use of the system and the way I did most of my testing since I sleep slightly heat. Nevertheless, ought to the temperature drop, you’ll be able to 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’ll be able to maintain fairly heat even if you happen to don’t zip up the bag. It additionally eliminates the necessity to sleep in a hat, which I’ve by no means appreciated.