America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
By Michael Lanza
Are you in the market for a new backpack, boots, tent, sleeping bag or other backpacking gear or apparel? How do you find something that’s just right for you? What should you be looking for? How much should you spend? These are questions I’ve heard from many friends and readers over the years as they’ve waded through the myriad choices out there. This article lays out five simple but helpful tips to keep in mind when buying gear.
Sleeping Bag
Nemo Riff 30 Endless Promise
$360, 1 lb. 15 oz./879g (men’s regular)
Sizes: men’s and women’s regular and long
backcountry.com
Nemo’s Riff down sleeping bags have long carved out a unique space among high-end backpacking bags with their spoon shape and comfortable dimensions, as well as the zippered “thermo gills” on the chest area for adjusting the bag’s degree of warmth to vent on mild nights or batten down the hatches on chilly nights. Spending eight nights in the 2024 update, the Riff 30 Endless Promise, in Glacier National Park in September and in southern Utah in early October, I found that Nemo maintained or improved on the Riff’s exclusive features—while making the bags fully recyclable.
Ultralight Sleeping Bag
Mountain Hardwear Phantom 30
$450, 1 lb. 6 oz./624g (unisex regular, 72-inch)
Sizes: unisex short ($440), regular, long ($480)
backcountry.com
Look at specs when shopping for a high-quality, ultralight, three-season sleeping bag and you might quickly trim your short list to about five models, all at basically similar weights and price points. But having slept in most of those top bags—and after sleeping in Mountain Hardwear’s Phantom 30 on cool nights on backpacking trips from a section of the Arizona Trail in the first days of April and camping at Idaho’s City of Rocks in June to the Canadian Rockies and Wind River Range in August—I place the Phantom 30 among the two or (maybe) three very best ultralight mummy bags for its strategic balance between low weight and excellent warmth. Here’s why.
Ultralight Sleeping Bag
Sierra Designs Mobile Mummy
$319, 2 lbs. 8 oz. (men’s regular)
Sizes: men’s regular and long ($290) and women’s ($300)
sierradesigns.com
Stepping out of my tent on our first morning in Arizona’s Aravaipa Canyon in the first week of April, I was greeted by an air temperature barely above freezing and a steady wind sailing through our camp at about 20 to 30 miles per hour. So I reacted in the only way that made sense: I wore my sleeping bag in camp. And I could do that and walk around easily (while my friends assumed postures of cold discomfort wearing their down jackets outside—or simply stayed in their tent) because my bag was the Sierra Designs Mobile Mummy 15° F/-9° C.
Ultralight Backpacking Quilt
Therm-a-Rest Vesper 32 Quilt
$380, 16 oz. (regular)
Sizes: regular and long
backcountry.com
For seven nights in huts on Iceland’s Laugavegur and Fimmvörðuháls trails in July—and to fit all of my clothing layers, food for a week, and other stuff inside my 40-liter pack while keeping it as light as possible—I decided to take the Therm-a-Rest Vesper 32 Quilt for its minimalist weight and excellent packability. And it turned out, that hut trek mimicked sleeping outside on mild nights, presenting ideal circumstances for weighing an ultralight backpacking quilt’s strengths and shortcomings.