Next spring, Therm-a-Rest looks to up your backcountry camping game with a new camping pad in their Speed Valve line and a comfortable, three-season sleeping bag to go with it. Weighing just over 3 pounds together, the new sleep system means you don’t have to sacrifice on warmth or comfort during your next backpacking trip.
By combining alternating foam and air channels with Therm-a-Rest’s Speed Valve technology, the Trail King SV ($130) fills within a few seconds and deflates even faster. If you recall, the Speed Valve takes advantage of physics to pull in surrounding air to amplify your breath, inflating the mattress in half the time of conventional valves.
With a luxurious 2.5-inch thickness, the camping pad is still backpacker friendly at 1 pound 13 ounces. And with an R-Value of 1.8, the Trail King SV offers you 3-season warmth.
To accompany the new pad, the Questar sleeping bag ($250) delivers 3-season warmth with 650-fill Nikwax Hydrophobic Down that is zoned to provide extra insulation where you need it most–on top of you in order to trap rising heat. You will find less fill on the bottom of the bag, where your camping pad already insulates you, and the value of lofted insulation is already minimized by compression. Removable straps keep the sleeping bag properly oriented on your camping pad to maximize warmth and save weight.
As your feet are usually the first to get cold and the hardest to warm up, Therm-a-Rest adds the Toe-asis (get it?) foot warmer–a baffled pocket of insulation in the footbox that helps rapidly warm cold feet. Just slide your feet in and let the Toe-asis do the work. Leave them out and you’ll still benefit from an extra layer of insulation in the foot of your sleeping bag. A thin strip of reflective tape behind every baffle seam reduces radiant and convective heat loss, ultimately keeping you warmer at night.
The snag-free zipper hides an oversized draft tube so no air gets in or out. A small zippered pocket on the outside of the bag is the best place to store your headlamp or phone for easy access in the middle of the night.
The regular size Questar sleeping bag weighs 2 pounds 5 ounces, with two more sizes available. Expect to see both this bag and the Trail King SV camping pad hit shelves around February next year.