Tried and true comfort from decades of durable construction with Therm-a-Rest, the Therm-a-Rest
Trail Lite Sleeping Pad is the do it all pad for camping, backpacking and traveling.
The Tail Lite is a, as the name suggests, a lighter weight version of some of their
other self inflating sleeping pads.
And it has really durable construction.
It is very comfortable and you have got protection from the ground here.
So we will go into all the different features and what makes this pad so great.
The reason this is called the self inflating sleeping pad is you have expandable foam on
the inside of the pad here that is open cell foam.
So it is very compressible, but when you open the valve on this pad and let air in, the
foam expands, soaks up the air like a sponge and inflates most of the way for you.
So what I normally do with a pad like this, I roll it out maybe 20 minutes or half an
hour before I am ready to camp out on it.
And I just let it do its thing for that long.
And then when I am ready to sleep on it, what I normally do is inflate the rest of the way
by mouth.
This doesn’t completely inflate all the way by it-self.
You do need to inflate it a little bit at the end, but it makes it really simple.
It is a lot easier to inflate than some of those completely inflatable sleeping pads.
So really durable construction there.
And some technology you can’t see from the front here, it is kind of behind the scenes,
is the way Therm-a-Rest constructs that foam.
So there is pressure mapping with this sleeping pad.
They make the foam a little bit firmer in certain areas and a little bit softer in other
areas just to make it more comfortable and to lighten the pad a little bit.
There are a lot of cutouts here on the pad.
So this is dye cut just to save on weight as well.
So there is a lot of technology there underneath the pad that makes the Therm-a-Rest construction
so great.
With that foam you have got one and a half inches of thickness when it is completely
inflated.
And that gives you an R value of 3.4.
So we normally say that a sleeping pad that is an R value of four or above is made for
four seasons.
So this is a little bit under that threshold.
So this is a great three season pad.
If you do want to use this in the coldest of temperatures, you can use maybe a closed
cell foam pad underneath of it just to get that R value up a little bit more.
But this is going to get you through most of the year with insulating you from the ground.
You have got really durable materials here on the top and on the bottom of the pad.
And this material is pretty silent.
So as opposed to some of those ultra light weight pads that are kind of crinkly and crunchy
and they are really noisy when you move around on them.
These types of pads are really silent.
Going up here to the valve also have really durable construction on the valve.
So this valve is really easy to use.
You basically turn it open and closed to kind of adjust the pressure there.
And one thing I really appreciate about Therm-a-Rest valves is that you can have a really dialed
in pressure.
This valve isn’t, you know, always open or always closed.
You can really dial that in.
So once you inflate the pad, if you lay on it, you can reach over your shoulder and just
kind of let a little bit of air out at a time.
That lets you sink into the pad a little bit and just, again, really durable construction
there.
There are two sizes available.
There is the regular, which is what we have here and the large.
The regular is 20 inches wide at the widest point.
It tapers down into the foot.
And it is 72 inches long.
So Therm-a-Rest does save a little bit of weight by having it taper and having the corners
kind of cut off there.
It makes this pad a little bit lighter weight.
And then the large version is 25 inches wide and 77 inches long.
So you have a little more sprawling comfort there.
They also include a stuff sack with the purchase of the Trail Lite.
And this does pack down to be pretty small.
I have found that I can roll this down even smaller than the size of the stuff sack.
So this pad is definitely it saves a lot of weight.
There is the durable, reliable construction from Therm-a-Rest.
And this is kind of your do it all pad.
It is great for camping and traveling and is light weight enough that you can take this
back packing, take it on multi day adventures.
It is the Therm-a-Rest Trail Lite Sleeping Pad.