Camping Air Mattress

The camping air mattress or air bed is a 'tried and true' article of basic camping gear. However, there are a few things you need to know about using one.

Sleeping on the ground , even with a plastic sheet, tarp or groundsheet under you, doesn't work. It's too hard. And because the cold and damp rise up from the ground and suck away your body heat, you'll wake up chilled to the bone and miserable at two or three in the morning, even if even if your were able to fall asleep at first because you were dog-tired.

You need some insulation between you and that cold, cold ground...

A camping air bed mattress like a Coleman or a Li-Lo is great in summer time - because it can help keep you cooler on hot nights. But the relatively large amount of air underneath you is not a good insulator - because there's room for the air to circulate - and it can get too cold for the cooler months. (In that case you would be warmer with an insulated foam sleeping pad, even though you might feel the hard ground a bit more.)

Blowing up an air bed using lung-power alone is an act of desperation. It takes so much huffing and puffing you're quite likely to blackout from the experience. Also, inflating things with lung-power also fills the inside of the mattress with water vapor from your exhaled breath. It's unhygienic, and the water condenses inside the mattress later, and is very hard to get rid of. So don't blow the air mattress with your breath.

Bring along an air pump of some kind with your camping air bed. It's far easier to use a small hand pump or an electric air pump that works off your car's 12 volt cigarette lighter socket. You can sometimes get bellows pumps you operate with your foot, but they're big and heavy and a bit clumsy in my personal opinion.

Most people inflate their air beds too hard. You'll sleep a lot better if you let some of that air out. Just make sure there's enough air to keep your body off the ground as you lie on the air mattress, and you'll have a great night's sleep.

An added bonus about an air bed is that they're great to use in the water as well. You can float on them in the pool, lie on one when you're chasing a suntan.

A decent-quality air mattress will be made of tough, rubberized material, and will last you for years as long as you take care of it. But it will be too heavy for backpacking.

Don't try to economize by using a cheap plastic air-bed designed for playing in the swimming pool... They usually go flat on you sometime in the middle of the night when it's real cold and uncomfortable. Stick with a good quality air mattress or use a foam pad.

Adventurous campers have even been known to float their backpacks across rivers on a camping air mattress. And there's also a whole water-sport called 'Canyoning' which involves riding long distances downstream on these rubber-and-canvas air beds; but that's another subject all on its own.