How to Choose the Best Camping Air Mattress / Sleeping Pad for Your Hike

The blogosphere of backpacking and camping is flooded with a humdrum of articles and guides with gear tips on choosing the right tent, boots, and whatnot. But with the growth of available information, the substance of the advice you get is diluted.

It seems like everybody is making list-type checklists, re-mulling the same information over and over. It’s information that already lives under the hat of any half-seasoned backpacker, and it comes down to commonplaces like “choose what’s right for you.”

Today we right that wrong, well, at least in one area that we feel has been silently evolving without most of the community taking notice – getting proper sleep on the trail.

Two areas we’ll focus on:

• R-value – what it means and how our perception of it should be changing to keep up with the evolving industry
• When a full-on air mattress might be an option for a backpacker and how to choose right

Where you can go wrong

It’s easy for an…