What to Do with Your Puffy Jacket at Night

It's a chilly evening in the backcountry and you have crawled in your tent ready to get some sleep. You are wearing your puffy jacket and deciding, do I wear it to sleep or take it off. We have all been there, and if you subscribe to the idea that everything in your pack should ideally serve more than one purpose, what are the best uses for it now?

Sleep in your puffy jacket

When the temperatures drop your first thought is that your puffy can be part of your sleep system. While we have all done that, chances are your sleeping bag is warm enough if you just give it time. In cooler weather it can take 30 minutes or more before you start to get comfortable, and even then you can keep heating up to the point that you may wake up sweating in the middle of the night. If you want to warm up faster, do a dozen jumping jacks or high knees right before you slip into your sleeping bag. You'll be warm in no time.

Some ultralight hikers carry a lighter quilt on purpose and plan on wearing their puffy to bed. This is a great weight saving tactic, but you might also think of your puffy as that extra just in case sleeping layer. On fast short trips it can be a good system, but if temperatures can swing significantly it may not be the best call. We like to make sure our quilt or sleeping bag covers 95% of the temperatures we might run into as the sole piece of warmth, with an insulated pad underneath.

If you wear your jacket to sleep and overheat, you start sweating, and that moisture has to go somewhere. Some of it soaks into your bag insulation, and the rest becomes even more warm humid air building up in your tent. Sleeping too warm can lead to a damp sleeping bag and more condensation on the tent and gear, especially noticeable on windless evenings.

Toss it in the corner of the tent

Tossing your puffy into the corner of your tent is what happens most nights. It kept you warm on those cool breaks during the day and around camp in the evening, and it will again in the early morning. There is no question you need it, and no one suggests heading out into the backcountry where temperatures can swing without a puffy. You could stuff it down in your sleeping bag to keep it warm for the morning, but it's mostly doing nothing for you all night. It is what it is, right? Meanwhile people pay big bucks for a "packable down pillow," and you have one lying in the corner of your tent.

Use a puffy jacket as a pillow

Now we are getting somewhere with multiple uses for that weight. The trick to using a puffy jacket as a pillow is keeping it all together and keeping it from going flat.

Some jackets have a pocket you can stuff the whole thing into and that's great, if the shape works, but you end up with the same old problem, it slides away. You can shove it in your sleeping bag hood, though it won't hold its shape for long. If you are using a quilt, be prepared to keep wrangling it back under your head all night, same as any pillow on a slick pad.

If you haven't run into one before, Pillow Strap is a soft stretchy pillowcase with an elastic strap and an adjuster buckle that wraps around your sleeping pad. Your pillow, or in this case your puffy jacket, goes inside the enclosure, and the strap holds it to the pad so it stays under your head all night. It works for both sleeping bag and quilt users.

The Small Pillow Strap size is best for use with lightweight three-season puffy jackets, as the enclosure is small enough to give it just the right height. Stuff your jacket inside the enclosure and you have a pillow. On nights when it's cold enough to need that puffy jacket for warmth, you can use fleece, extra clothing, or even your raincoat so you still have a pillow, and it will probably be softer than an inflatable pillow. For less than two ounces you get a cozy ultralight pillow that stays under your head.

Create a Pillow System

Once your pillow is strapped to the pad, you have the start of a pillow system. Now you can customize your pillow stack to the comfort you prefer, and everything is held together. This can be anything from your sun shirt folded in quarters and sitting onto your pillow for a touch of softness to stacking two pillows together for people with extra-wide shoulders that sleep on their side. We all have our preferences on what we need our pillow to do, why settling for what the designers of your inflatable pillow thought was comfortable or hit the price point they were aiming for. With a Pillow Strap system, all your soft layers are washable too, unlike some camp pillows.

One of Brian's favorite uses for his puffy or a fleece is to stuff it inside the Medium Pillow Strap on top of a pillow, such as The Camp Pillow or any 16 to 18 inch wide pillow. It gives a little softer feel and a little more height for those of us who seem to fall asleep best on our sides.

Knee pillow for back sleepers?

This idea wasn't obvious to us until a customer told us about their clever use for their Pillow Strap. As we get older our knees just scream about everything. Want to sleep on your back after a long day of hiking? That means your knees are going to lock straight, resting flat on your sleeping pad. For some people that's something you never notice, but if you have any irritation in your knees, having your legs straight can cause extra pain or discomfort while you are trying to sleep.

This doesn't take a full pillow to fix either. Take a Small Pillow Strap and put your puffy coat, rain jacket, or extra clothing inside of it. Strap it around your sleeping pad right under your knees and it creates just enough height to stop your knees from locking straight, without being so bulky that it feels weird if you roll onto your side.

Just remember to always keep your Pillow Strap around your sleeping pad and not around any part of your body.

We hope you found some of these ideas interesting. We love hearing about how people use their Pillow Strap and how we can all get better sleep on the trail. If you have something unique that you do, we would love to hear about it, reach out. We are all about great sleep at camp.