Gear – Do It Yourself – Cleaning a down sleeping bag

We are addicted to our down sleeping bags. They give us the much needed comfort on a night’s sleep on the mountains in the cold seasons. When sweating and farting out those freeze-dried evening suppers, you can imagine in which condition the bag gets after hundred’s of nights out there. Above the odours, the feathers loose much of their elasticity from compressing and decompressing it over and over again. In the end the sleeping bag will loose comfort temperature and will look pale as an overaged rag.

Want to upgrade back your down sleeping bag to its original, new state? Just wash it! Down feathers just love to be washed. They just revive after a good wash. Goose do spent quite some time in the waters, now don’t they? Cleaning will have your down sleeping bag perform better, last longer, and keep you warmer!

When it comes to cleaning down sleeping bags or quilts, most outdoor people i talk to, are afraid they just gonna ruin their valuable and costly (winter) down sleeping bag. People tend to go to (industrial) dry cleaners, in the understanding that those business know how to deal with down. Wrong! I heard dramtaic stories from outdoor enthousiast retrieving their beloved down bag from dry cleaners in a horror state.

So here is how it goes. Prepare a full day at home to be at the side of your beloved down bag. On the drying part, your input will be repeatedly for quite some hours!

1) Ecover Delicate or a similar product is the only washing liquid usable. Other soaps will damage the feathers. Washing softeners are obvious down bag killers! Here’s one very imporatant thing to remember: it’s really easy to get soap into the down feathers, but it’s way harder to get it out.

2) Close all zippers and compress the sleeping bag as good as possible before pushing in in the washer.

Ecover Delicate

Open all zippers

3) Any home washer will do the drill as long as the volume of the washer can handle your sleeping bag! You don’t have to spend all day on one of those big street front washers.

4) Before using the washer, you should remove all soap rests from the soap collection tray!

Clean the tray!

5) Select the down or delicate program and add some Ecover Delicate. Temperature not above 30°C/86°F. Rincing minimum 800 turn/min (down sleeping bag has to be as water free as possible after washing). Never dry wash the down bag, it could be completely ruined in the end.

6) When the program is ready, be very careful! Get the completely ruined down bag out of the washer and put it slowly in a laundry basket. The sleeping bag is at its weakest now. The down will be collapsed into lumps and weighs as hell which can easily tear down the stitchet compartments ( keeping the down in place in the bag).

Carefully remove the down bag from the washer

5) Bring the bag to your wash drier. Open the zippers!

: Open the zippers!

6) This is the trickiest part of the process: the drying! Add all the tennis balls you can find around the house and add them with the down bag to the drier. The balls will hammer into the feathers trying to get the lumps loose.

Add tennis balls to the drier

7) Put the dryer at approximately 30°C/86°F. You will need to stop the dryer every once in a while (every hour ) to take out the down bag and lay it on the floor in full length. Remove all torsions and seperate the lumps of down by hand. Hit the bag with a flat hand, which will force the feathers to expand from each other. Put back in the dryer and repeat this step for 8 – 12 hours until the bag is completely dry and back in volume.

The result is unbelievable: the bag will look like fresh from the store, in full volume and ready for the mountains! The same procedure can be done for any down clothes (down jackets,…).

I now wash our down bags every year, with great succes!

Good luck!

The wild and icy east coast of Greenland

After our warm-up hike along the hot springs of Iceland, we got into a way too small propeller plane toward the great white spot on the northern hemisphere: Greenland.

Low tide ice in Tiniteqilaaq

For a small three weeks, we immerse ourselves in an adventure in the inhospitable wilderness of East-Greenland, just below the Arctic Circle, where polar bears rule and broadly smiling Inuit chase you out of the village with nothing more than courage and a firm charged gun.

Schweizerland, as seen from Ningerti, at the head of Sermilik Fjord

Together with our long time friends, Dries and Ellen, we leave for a self-organized expedition trek along pristine fjords, filled with giant icebergs, over rugged passes and across empty tundra valleys of the far north. A few weeks into the wilderness, away from any form of human civilization can not go on without a firm preparation, even though every day is as unpredictable as the night. You guessed it right: we would encounter no human trace for the coming weeks.

Unnamed Pass in the Tasilap Kua Valley

The global warming is affecting the Inuit big time. Not only do the glaciers of the Greenlandic ice sheet melt at a hurling speed, also the annually increasing melting pack ice of the Arctic, drifing away southwards, brings in more polar bears into the region. Where the region, during summer, used to be”polar bear free”, the last years more and more polar bears are spotted in full summer along the fjords and around the Inuit villages. In Kulusuk, the village where we start our trek, we hear many stories of polar bear incidents in recent weeks.

Ice berg dotted Sermilik Fjord

The hunter who sales us into a remote fjord, “obliged” us to take his gun on our trek. But we have never ever used a gun before? “No problem, it is very easy, you aim in the direction of the bear and just shoot at chest or head,” he laughs .

Want some mister? Polar Bear Safety Precautions

We already have been in quite a few adventures so far, but what we experience in Greenland, surpasses all our dreams we ever had on this destination. Neck muscle defying granite walls cleave out of of the fjords and valley bottems as knives into the air, perpetual pink sunsets, huge glaciers that filled the fjords with icebergs the size of the football stadiums. And we have not talked about our new hobby: wading glacial rivers…

Arctic Sunset, Sermilik Fjord

We could fill books with our experiences, but above all let us show you a selection of jaw-dropping pictures, which caused a huge infection on our eyes last summer or go through the selection on our travelblog

Click here for our Greenland SPOT Page

Island of fire and ice

A summer month under the Arctic Circle, seems an excellent plan to appease the hungry love that we cherish for the far north. Before we embark on a wild backpacking trip into East- Greenland, we throw our legs loose, on the with trolls and elves populated Iceland.

On the intriguing island in the middle of the Atlantic, there is an eternal battle going on between its large ice sheets and active volcanoes (from which Eyjafjallajökull now has reached the celebrity status).

: Mýrdalsjökull Volcanic Outwash

This constant spectacle hews the landscape into an alien profile. With only 3 inhabitants/km², the island, once away from the coast, is a volcanic desert, where almost no life is possible. It is a paradise for outdoor enthusiasts. There are few footpaths to find, so it’s ripe for exploration.

Volcanic dessert

With our upcoming Greenlandic adventure in mind, we choose to walk the relatively easy Laugavegurinn (Warm Sources Route). Although this 4-day route is rightly popular, it is surprising that this trip gets little mention in the many lists of “Top Treks of this World”. Nowhere in the world you get so close to such a variety of landscapes in such short time: glaciers, ice caps, active volcanoes, fumaroles, bubbling mini-geysers, raging rivers, vast lakes, (ash) deserts and rainbow-colored rhyolite mountains.

Leaving the tarp

We follow the “Laugavegur” (pet name for the route, named after the busy shopping street in Reykjavik) northward instead of the mostly southward followed route. The route has a number of huts, but in order to avoid the crowds, we look for silent bivouac spots, away from the main route to set up our new tarp.

Please have a look at the photo album or go through the selection on our travelblog