Review of the Enlightened Equipment Accomplice 2-Person Quilt: Backpacking & Alpine Climbing

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I once had someone tell me that we should think of our sleeping bag (or in this case - “quilt”) like a house. For the house to keep us warm, it needs two things: an insulation layer (including the windows) that is sufficient to keep the outside air from overpowering the inside environment, and a furnace that is powerful enough to fill the house with heat. In other words, the house’s insulation doesn’t keep you warm; the furnace keeps you warm and the insulation keeps the furnace’s good work inside the house. Bad insulation, you get cold. Furnace that isn’t powerful enough to heat up the house, and you still get cold no matter how good the insulation.

That became a very important analogy once I was taking kids into the backcountry. Their little bodies shouldn’t be called upon to fill up an adult-sized sleeping bag with heat. Until the boys got taller, we bound the footbox of our sleeping bags with an elastic cord. We couldn’t turn the boys into bigger furnaces, so we shrunk the size of the house we were asking them to heat up.

Here in lies the logic of the Enlightened Equipment Accomplice 2-Person Sleeping Quilt. Yes, the quilt is bigger to accommodate two human bodies, but it isn’t double the size of a single-person bag or quilt. However, we have added an entire second “furnace” to the equation. The shared body heat that we normally lose in our individual sleep systems is now free to be shared.

Take a look at the video for a longer explanation of this, how it still allows each of the two individuals to “customize” their level of exposure to the outside air as conditions change, as well a more on the construction and features.

But, when it comes to keeping us warm in the cold, another analogy might be that of gloves versus mittens. If we have the same materials and size, mittens are warmer because the individual fingers aren’t separated and therefore can share their heat with one another.

This setup worked so well (and was uniformly believed to be a warmer option by all four of my family members who tried out the Accomplice) that I am going to try out a zero-degree (Fahrenheit) version over the winter. I’ll let everyone know how it goes, but I am anticipating quite the success, given that I’ve already made the jump to quilts over mummy bags for my individual setup. So, with a partner, I expect this shared option to be just that much more warm, again.

Yet another example of mutual support in climbing (or adventuring of any kind)… even when we are sleeping.