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Posted by Bill S on March 5, 2008 at 6:46:58 pm EST
In reply to How good is my old sleeping bag? posted by utahhiker on March 5, 2008 at 4:48:28 pm EST

First, the Bigfoot is a synthetic bag, using an early version of Polargard for your 9 year-old one. They changed the rating between my 1992 Bigfoot and your 1998 or 1999 one from -10F to 0F (I think the change was about 1996 or 1997).

When you say "stuffed away", do you mean stuffed tightly in the backpacking stuff sack that came with it (or some other backpacking stuff sack - the Bigfoot requires a "large" or maybe "extralarge, depending on how hard you wanted to work at shoving it in)? Or did you store it in a large laundry bag or leave it laid out on a shelf (I'm guessing not)?

My Bigfoot got a fair amount of use and has definitely lost loft, now being probably more like a +10F bag. For a river trip, the Bigfoot is probably good down to +10F, or if you kept it tightly stuffed, +15 to +20F. Since it is synthetic, I would say you are good to go (dangerous to offer an opinion without seeing it, so take this with a grain of salt). A test is to lay it out and fluff it up well. Then measure the loft (how thick it is fully fluffed and stretched out. If it is 5 or 6 inches or more, it should do for your river trip. And being synthetic (Polargard has always done well when it gets wet - dries fairly quickly, you can wring most of the water out if it gets soaked, retains some insulating quality, even if soaking wet; it's just bulky and doesn't compress well, though that doesn't matter on a river trip).

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• Re: How good is my old sleeping bag? - utahhiker 19:43:11 03/05/2008

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