I don't trust the rating of a bag that is cheap and said to keep someone warm at 20 degrees.. by whose standards?
But then, that is going back to what I learned in Scouts as a kid on military bases... but hell, we even had Special Forces soldiers as advisors to our Troops and Explorer posts.. they did so, because many of them had been scouts in their youth.
So I had exposure to cold weather survival, via scouts and via military personnel who were volunteers with BSA.
But how much I knew, even in Basic, kept us from having a fair number of cold weather casualties during Basic Training.
I got a lot more indepth training in the military. Being a corpsman, I was the guy that had to fix these guys up and get them back into duty availability. So how would it look if the medic, made himself a casualty, due to cold weather.
Actually when it gets really cold, and knowing how to deal with it, I sleep like a baby in cold weather. Much more comfortable than in hot high humidity weather.
you should want a bag designed to retain your body warmth, without making you sweat. At the same time, too many folks over insulate, sweat and are then getting chilled as the cheap sleeping bag they bought, doesn't retain all of their own body heat within the sleeping bag. a cover over the sleeping bag, that will not absorb moisture is a better bet than putting another layer of clothes or blankets within the sleeping bag.
Most people get cold, because they either weren't trained or dont think the big picture thru.
In the reserves in both Washington State and Minnesota, our duty stations if war broke out, were either, Alaska, Canada or Scandanavia ( Norway ).. so we were trained to deal with cold weather, in the extreme. and in Minnesota, I was attached to a MASH unit....
