You don’t need $500 worth of gear for backpacking. This $30 Supermarket Sleeping Bag Proves It

The supermarket would seem an unlikely place to buy backpacking gear. But there he was, sitting on the corner of a shelf among beach chairs and Kraft Mac and Cheese: A World Famous Sports 40-50 Degree Ultra Light Sleeping BagCrushed into one liter Nalgene sized packages.

I wasn’t originally trying to prepare for a backpacking trip. My family and I were on an early road trip down the Oregon Coast, where we spent our days tidepooling, whale watching, and hiking parts of the Oregon Coast Trail and our nights car-camping at coastal inns or at one of the many state parks located along the shoreline. That was the plan anyway: After a few cold nights, it became clear that my wife Natalie’s sleeping bag was not warm enough. When we stopped at Fred Meyer to resupply the next day, I started looking for something to add a few more degrees to his setup. I looked at fleeces, cheap comforters, and even space blankets before my eyes fell on a small brown synthetic sleeping bag. It was small enough that I thought we’d be able to fit it in our luggage, and, at $30, cheap enough that I wouldn’t feel bad giving it away if we couldn’t. Combined with Nate’s car camping bag, this worked to keep him comfortable.

After that trip, the Ultra Light lived mostly in the trunk of my car, where it was pressed into service for ski-season parking lot naps and a few other things. Many years later, in September 2025, I finally went backpacking for the first time with my 6-year-old son on a three-day, two-night trip to the Canyonlands Needles District. Since most of the equipment will be in my pack, I checked my gear loft for the most compact bag in my arsenal. For my son, I picked up a cozy Therm-a-Rest filled with 900-fill down. for myself? I threw away the cheap gray bag and added a liner if needed.

On the way to Canyonlands, we stopped at the Bureau of Land Management’s Rabbit Valley Campground, a rocky, hilly stretch of desert off I-70 near the Colorado/Utah state line, and set up our tent under a sky dark enough to see the Milky Way. The surprising thing is that the $30 sleeping bag held up: At about 1 a.m. the temperature crossed 40, I felt so cold that I started slipping on my grid fleece, but after that, I slept soundly.

That cheap bag definitely has some shortcomings. The design is blocky for a backpacking bag, with a wide, square foot box. There’s no draft tube, so on cool nights I have to tuck the wide hood in tightly, or else lose heat. And that “40 to 50”-degree temperature rating? Let’s call this optimistic: I found the bag comfortable at 50°F and perfectly fine at 45°F with a light midlayer or liner. I tried sleeping in it the other night when the temperature dropped to 40 degrees Fahrenheit and the best thing I can say about the experience is that I didn’t die. Although it’s one of the lightest and most compact models in my arsenal, being the only summerweight bag or quilt I own, it’s definitely not the best built (though when you’re camping with a kid who’s careless with your gear, that’s not always a bad thing).

But perhaps we have forgotten how little it matters. Like a lot of backpackers, I had no money when I started hiking, which meant my gear choices depended on what I wanted rather than what I could get. The first coat I bought myself was an XL women’s North Face shell that was on sale at 50 percent off at Eastern Mountain Sports because someone had accidentally cut a hole in it; My first shoes, a pair of beat-up Keynes from an REI garage sale that, according to the tags, someone had worn for a year and then returned. I’m not going to argue that any of that gear was good, at all; After testing the lightest jackets, bounciest trail runners, and fluffiest down quilts produced by the outdoor industry over the past 11 years, I can appreciate the quality. But sometimes, I think it’s healthy to be reminded that in a grassroots sport like backpacking, good enough is, well, good enough. The purpose of gear is to get you out safely, not to be perfect in every detail.

Is my supermarket sleeping bag good enough? After my fourth trip with it, I would say so. On a trip to Colorado’s Golden Gate State Park with my son in June, I put that gray bag in my pack for him, along with a light quilt for me. That night, the sky overcast and hail began to fall, marble-sized pieces bouncing off the metal roof so loudly that we had to shout over the racket to hear each other. That night, he slept soundly, the ripstop nylon hood pulled tightly over his head.