The worst part of camping is waking up freezing in the middle of the night.
A few summers ago, we went camping in Yellowstone. It was hot and sunny during the day; the kind of August heat that makes you second-guess packing anything heavier than a flannel. I tend to run cold, so I brought my 30-degree bag and a few extra pairs of socks, but kept my pack light. It was summer, after all.
What I didn’t expect was the cold.
The hot August days dropped to freezing temperatures overnight. The second night was the worst: rainy and 28 degrees. I put on every pair of socks in my bag and wrapped up in my sleeping bag as tightly as I could, trying desperately to keep the chill from creeping in. I shifted positions. I pulled the hood of the bag over my face. We even dragged ourselves out of the hammock in the middle of the night to build a fire. Nothing helped.
When at last the morning came, my back and my feet felt frozen. I was exhausted, stiff, and deeply unimpressed with myself as a backcountry camper.
Now I know exactly what I was missing: an underquilt.
What Is a Hammock Underquilt?
An underquilt is a layer of insulation that hangs beneath your hammock, serving the same purpose as a sleeping pad in tent camping. It insulates you from below, which matters more than you think; in a hammock, your back is fully exposed to the open air. Your sleeping bag compresses under your body weight, losing its insulating power right where you need it most. An underquilt fills that gap.
Think of it this way: if you crawled into your sleeping bag and slept on the bare ground with no pad, you’d be miserable. The ground (or in this case, the air) pulls heat right out of you from below. A sleeping pad, or an underquilt, breaks this cycle.
There’s an old saying among cold-weather campers: a layer underneath you is worth two on top. After Yellowstone, I believe it completely.
Down vs. Synthetic Underquilts
Like sleeping bags, underquilts come in both down and synthetic fills; the choice matters depending on how and where you camp.
Down underquilts are lighter, more compressible, and tend to have a better warmth-to-weight ratio; they’re ideal if you’re backpacking and counting ounces. The tradeoff is that down loses its insulating power when wet and takes a long time to dry, so it’s less forgiving in rainy conditions. Down also compresses during transport and storage, so you’ll need to fluff it back out for proper heat retention.
Synthetic underquilts are much heavier and bulkier, but they hold up much better in damp weather, can take more of a beating, and are generally less expensive. If you camp mostly in wet climates or you don’t want to invest heavily, synthetic is a solid choice.
For most three-season hammock campers, either works well. If you’re primarily a fair-weather camper, down is worth the investment. If you’re out in variable or wet conditions, synthetic gives you more peace of mind.
Temperature Ratings
Underquilts are rated by temperature the same way sleeping bags are. The same rule applies: buy colder than you think you need. If you typically camp in temperatures that dip into the forties, a 20- or 30-degree underquilt gives you a comfortable buffer. Manufacturers’ ratings tend to assume ideal conditions, and conditions are rarely ideal.
Consider the range of your camping season, not just your average night. Our Yellowstone trip was in August; I never would’ve predicted 28 degrees. A little extra rating goes a long way toward actually sleeping through the night.
Do I Need One?
If you hammock camp and you’ve ever woken up cold in the night, yes.
The hammock is a uniquely cold-vulnerable sleep setup due to the exposed underside. Unlike tent camping, where the ground gives you at least some thermal mass to work with, a hammock suspends you in open air on all sides. Your sleeping bag alone can’t compensate for that; it’s not designed to.
If you camp exclusively in the summer heat and never dip below 60 degrees overnight, you might get away without one. But for anyone camping in shoulder seasons, at elevation, or anywhere with unpredictable temperatures, an underquilt is less of an accessory and more of a necessity.
It works so well as an insulator, most of the time we skip the sleeping bags altogether in warmer weather. Just the underquilt and a light blanket for comfort get us through the summer.
Honestly, even on some colder nights above freezing temperatures, the underquilt plus a top quilt keeps us warm and cozy into the morning.
How Do I Use an Underquilt?
This is the best part: it couldn’t be simpler. You hang the underquilt beneath your hammock and clip it into place with carabiners at each end. That’s it. Your body heat does the rest.
When my husband, Jon, first showed me his underquilt, he told me to hold my hand against the fabric and feel how quickly it warmed up. Within seconds, I could already feel the heat radiating back; I was sold!
I bought one and took it on our first camping trip of the season the following spring. The temperatures dropped into the low thirties that night (not far off from Yellowstone) and I slept soundly. Once we tucked in, it took maybe five to ten minutes for my body heat to build up inside the quilt, and I drifted off without a second thought about the cold.
No 3AM sock layering or fire building. No stiff, frozen back in the morning. Just cozy sleep.
If you’ve been hammock camping without one, I genuinely believe it will change your experience. It changed mine.
How do you stay warm on cold camping nights? Drop a comment below; I’d love to know what’s worked for you.
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