The Piteraq Sleep System, and Why It Organized the Whole Day

By Alastair Sanderson

Six days on Svalbard in April, hauling a pulk. The piece of kit I think about most from that trip is not the tent and not the parka. It is the bag the bedding went in.

The Piteraq Arctic Bedding sits on top of the pulk and swallows the entire sleep system. Foam mat, inflatable, sleeping bag, all of it inside. The tent loads on top. Written down that sounds like a stuff sack with ambitions, and for the first day that is roughly how I treated it, right up until I understood that it could be a major additive to my day, not just somewhere to keep my bed.

Getting into the tent

Here is what changed my mind about it.

The mistake people make is thinking about arriving at camp as the end of the day. You arrive cold and you arrive hungry, and there is a stretch of work ahead of you before anything gets better. Kit inside, stove going (you have to melt a crazy amount of snow), food into yourself. Sleep is a long way off.

So the thing that matters is not how fast you can lie down. It is how quickly you get from standing in the wind to being inside and able to work, because every step in between is one you will do badly. Your judgment has gone by then and you do not notice.

With this bag it was short. Pull up with the pulk. Secure the pulk so it cannot slide away from you. Drag the whole bag straight into the tent, unzip it and flip the top, and everything is sitting there in the order I needed it, foam pad down, inflatable on top, sleeping bag on top of that. I would still have to finish inflating the mattress, so it is not quite a made bed. But there is no rummaging and no working out which stuff sack has the liner in it.

The part I underrated was that the same bag was carrying my evening food. One sack held the bed and the meal. That is two jobs I did not have to think about separately at the exact moment I was least able to think.

The case for sizing up

The one thing that cost me time was a buying decision rather than a design fault.

To get the zip closed I had to let some air out of the inflatable. Doing that in the morning is easy enough, twenty seconds when you are warm and functional. The problem is the other end. It means extra pumping at night, and night is exactly when you do not want extra work. You are cold, you are hungry, and every pump is a small tax at the worst possible moment.

If I were buying again I would go a size up. Somebody else on the trip had the larger version and did not have this problem at all. The lesson is not that the bag is difficult. It is that if you are running a thick, high-volume inflatable, buy the bag with room for it inflated and you remove the tax entirely.

The top pockets, which are the other half of the product

Across the top there is a zipper running over two segmented compartments, which I did not think much of when I packed and which ended up being the reason the whole system worked.

During the day, I loaded one side with gloves, hat, and my face system. The other side held a water bottle and the snacks I was going to want later, the ones I thought of as being for the future rather than for now.

I ran the food on a rotation. When I stopped, I pulled a snack out of the inner pocket in my clothing, the one against my body, and started eating that. Then I took a fresh snack from the top of the bag and moved it into that inner pocket, so it was warming against me for the next break. The bag holds the future, my jacket holds the present, and every stop moves one item along the line.

Cold food is difficult in a way nobody warns you about, because bars go hard and anything you have to pick at is close to impossible in big mitts. Keeping the next snack against your body for an hour or two is the difference between food you can eat and food you carry around all day. Check that your clothing actually has the internal pockets to do this, because mine did not have as many as I wanted and that was a real limitation.

The other thing about those pockets is how much they hold. They are deep, and they take far more than you would guess from looking at them. A puffer vest went into one at one point, and a full thermal outer layer will go in without a fight.

That turns them into layer management, which is most of what you actually do out there. The counterintuitive rule in cold weather is that you spend the day trying not to get warm, because the moment you sweat into your insulation it freezes and stops insulating. So you strip and add layers constantly. Having somewhere to put a shed layer that you can reach and work with mitts on, without opening the main body of anything, is worth more than it sounds.

Building the next twenty-four hours

The habit I got into, and the one I would keep, was loading the bag every morning with the whole coming cycle rather than just the sleeping kit. The day's food and water in the top pockets, the evening meal in there too, and any accessories I knew I would want. Once that was done the day was laid out, and I was not making decisions about food at two in the afternoon in the wind. I had made them at eight in the morning in the tent, which is a much better place to make them.

That is the actual skill in cold-weather travel, and it is not toughness. It is thinking one full cycle ahead rather than one hour ahead.

Which points at the thing I would tell anyone packing for a trip like this. Do not pack by product. Almost everyone sorts their kit into a bag of base layers, a bag of food, a bag of toiletries, and it feels tidy and it is wrong. Sort by time of day instead, so one bag holds the whole morning and another holds the whole evening. You grab a single bag and it is all there.

The Arctic Bedding is the physical version of that idea. It is not really a bedding bag. It is the container for one whole day, and it happens to have your bed in it.

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If it is useful, I have written up everything I took on this trip and why, item by item, including what I got wrong. It is at https://alastairmsanderson.com.

Greenland next, then the South Pole. The bag is coming with me.