Iditarod Invitational Sleep System

Hypothetical situation:

It’s 2 AM. You just spent 18 hours skiing a remote snowmobile trail into the middle of nowhere. You haven’t seen another person for fourteen hours. You are exhausted. You can’t fathom one more stride, and even if you could, the dangers lurking on the trail combined with your current state of semi-conscious tunnel vision could be a potentially lethal situation. It’s time to bivy down, get some rest, and attack the trail in a few hours with a clearer mind. And, oh yeah, its 30 degrees below zero, and your sleeping bag is rated to -20 F. Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you?

This is the question that has haunted me more than any other as I look forward to the Iditarod Invitational. My sleeping bag is rated to -20 F, but I’d never used it at temperatures below zero. I needed to find out if I was going to trust my life to this bag at temperatures that could easily drop below -20.

I took advantage of the early January cold snap (brief tangent: it is still called a ‘snap’ if it lasts two weeks? I guess ‘cold fortnight’ doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily) to do some testing. I slept outside using my current gear on a night when the mercury bottomed out at -21 F. My assessment was that the bag kept me juuuuust warm enough to get some sleep, but my sleeping pad (a Thermarest Z-lite) was too thin. I lost a lot of heat through that pad. In the middle of the night, I added another, much thicker, pad and was significantly warmer.

So the bag performed well, but I need more padding between me and the snow. Did the bag give me confidence that it would work at -30? Or lower? Not really. So the next day, I ponied up for the bag I have been longing after for months: A Feathered Friends Snow Goose. Rated to -40. And its lighter and compresses smaller than my Puma. Double bonus.

I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to shell out for a new bag. But is it worth risking a few toes or much worse, just to save several hundred bucks? Not to me.

So my sleep system for the Iditarod Invitational will include the following:

• Feathered Friends Snow Goose -40F sleeping bag
• Thermarest Z-Lite foam pad
• A smaller blue foam pad, primarily used as a bed-liner for my gear sled, but can be put under the Z-Lite for extra warmth.
• REI Minimalist Bivy Sack
• Space Blanket emergency bivy sack, as a vapor barrier liner in case I need to bivy while really wet or sweaty.