NeoAir for Every Season

©Earl Harper

©Earl Harper So what makes a camping mattress suitable for every season? To me it has to be at least lightweight and compact and yet warm enough for winter. Therm-aRest’s new All-Season NeoAir Mattress is all of the above and probably more. The smallest version weighs about 510g and the larger version is 710g. It’s [...]

Kooka Bay Ultralight Sleeping Pad

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When in comes to sleeping pads, Kooka Bay is not as big a name as Therm-a-Rest, Big Agnes or Exped but that doesn’t mean it’s no better than any of them. In fact when compared to Exped’s Down Mat 7, the Kooka Bay Down Air Mattress is better in many ways. At 18.2 oz., the [...]

Unique M.A.T. – “Mat Air Together”

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The M.A.T. (Mat Air Together) is a picnic mat with cleverly positioned compartments that can be inflated individually for a variety of uses. Blow up the center compartment and you get a low table where you can serve food or play board games. Never before can the humble picnic mat be used as a pillow, [...]

Sand-Free Multi-Mat – The Mattress That’s Always Free from Sand

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To be honest, I didn’t get what the CGear Multi-mat was all about. It promises to keep your area free from sand even when it is kicked into your space. Isn’t it puzzling? Or was I just too dumb to understand what was meant in the description of it but how can you prevent sand [...]

A Heated Camping Mat to Keep You Warm in Winter

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A camping mattress is more critical than a sleeping bag if you want to keep warm in winter because you can lose more heat faster to the ground than through the cold air. I don’t recommend you leave your sleeping bag behind and just take the camping mat with you into sub-zero temperature zones. That [...]

The Ridge Rest Solar Sleeping Pad

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The name might be a little bit misleading because the Ridge Rest Solar sleeping pad from Therm-a-rest has nothing to do with charging electronics using the power of the sun. It’s a closed-cell sleeping pad with a heat-reflecting aluminized surface that replaces and improves on the older Ridge Rest Deluxe. The Ridge Rest Solar sleeping [...]

Aerobed PakMat Rolls into its Own Pump

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The Aerobed PakMat is not the only camping mattress that comes with a pump but it’s the first one I’ve seen that packs inside one. That means there’s little chance you’ll lose the pump if you’re not going to use the pad for some time. But you can still lose the pump though. A bear [...]

Alpkit Numo Sleeping Pad – Thin and Light

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At just 16.5 ounces, Alpkit’s Numo Sleeping Pad is just about lighter than the Gold Award winner (at the European Outdoor Tradeshow 2010), Exped SynMat UL (16.6 ounces). I love what Alpkit wrote as their description of the Numo: “The day had been a long one, tea of sorts had been eaten and the bike [...]

Klymit Inertia X-Frame – Worlds Most Packable Camping Pad

Klymit Inertia X-Frame Pad Packed

There are few backpacking gear at the Outdoor Retailer that created more buzz than the new camping pad from Klymit, the Inertia X-Frame Pad. It’s certainly the weirdest looking one I’ve ever seen because it seems like a camping mattress with some parts missing. I probably wouldn’t even recognize what it is if it wasn’t [...]

RidgeRest Deluxe Closed Cell Foam Sleeping Pad In Your Choice of Sizes

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RidgeRest Deluxe Closed Cell Foam Sleeping Pad In Your Choice of Sizes Photo by BackpackingLight Lightweight and packable, the classic RidgeRest Deluxe is Therm-a-Rest’s thickest and warmest closed-cell foam pad. This durable pad can be used independently for general camping or in tandem with another pad as an extra base layer. The Therm-a-Rest RidgeRest Deluxe [...]