Reviews > Sleep Gear > Sleeping Bags > TNF Cats Meow > Owner Review by Matt Mauceri

The North Face Cats Meow

Owner Review

Date of Review 3/06/2004

Tester Biography

Name: Matt Mauceri

Age: 23

Gender: Male

Height: 5 ft 7 in (170 cm)

Weight: 146 lb (66 kg)

Email address: dirtyhippieboy(at)yahoo(dot)com

City, State, Country: Holland, Pa, USA

Backpacking Style: I’m usually a quick escape artist who often has a pack waiting in the car for the minute I’m done work and will have a day or two off. I try to keep my pack weight to a minimum, and I’ve upgraded parts of my gear list, but I’m not yet an ultralight guy, just someone who is getting there slowly.

Product Information

The North Face Cats Meow

Manufacturer: The North Face

URL: http://www.thenorthface.com

Year of Manufacture: 2002

Degree Rating: 20° F (-6° C)

Fill Type: Polarguard Delta

Bag Shape: Mummy

Size Reviewed: Regular

Zipper Style: Right Hand

Listed Weight: 2 lb 13 oz (1276 g)

Actual Weight: 2 lb 15 oz (1332 g)

Stuff Sack Size: 8" x 17" (20.3 cm x 43.2 cm)

Length: 84" (213 cm)

Max User Height: 6'0" (183 cm)

Shoulder Girth: 62 in (157 cm)

Hip Girth: 58 in (147 cm)

Foot Girth: 40 in (102 cm)

MSRP: $169

Product Description

I came across The North Face Cats Meow while looking for a lightweight synthetic filled sleeping bag. They were the only manufacturer to use the new Polarguard Delta fill, which brought their bag weights lower than the competition. According to The North Face website Polarguard Delta has all of the advantages that the popular Polarguard 3D has but has the added benefits of 10% better loft, as well as 12% less weight. This has to do with how the fill is constructed, using a higher denier (larger) fiber, more air space within that fiber, and a thinner wall. The end result is a synthetic fill, which is highly compressible that is supposed to stay warmer than down fill will when wet.

This bag, while of lighter weight, is not shy on features. They used an overlapping shingle construction to hold the insulation in place, which eliminates cold spots forming. The shingle construction requires a little more time to be spent constructing it, than the simple baffle design most companies use, but is really an investment in comfort and quality for the next few years, since it keeps the bag performing properly for longer.

The pull cords to adjust the mummy hood are easy to use even with one hand; they made the cords different colors so you know which one you are pulling. There is a yellow flat cord for the section of hood that goes around the top of the head, and a black elastic shock cord that controls the area near the chin. I found the two different textures of the material to be more useful for determining which section I was adjusting than the color of them since most of the time I was in the bag, it was dark out. The cords are located on the opposite side of the bag from the zipper at about chin level.

The zipper is a two-way zipper, meaning it can be zipped open from the head section or the foot section. This feature is nice in warmer weather since it provides ventilation to the feet without having to unzip the zipper all the way. There is a draft tube, which is an insulation overflap that covers the zipper area, eliminating a draft from coming in from the zipper area. The bag is still easy to zip without any snags even with the draft tube right there because they used a heavier cloth on the draft tube to keep the material from being pulled into the zipper.

At the head level zipper end, there is a mesh watch pocket, which was a great thought since it allows a watch alarm to be heard in the morning. It’s also big enough to hold a pair of earplugs, which is what I’ve used it for, since I always seem to camp with some major snorers. Underneath the head section is a nylon sleeve that they call a Pillow Pocket. The idea here is that clothing can be stuffed up inside this area to act as a pillow that moves with you. It has Velcro on it to keep it shut.

The shell is made from a fabric called Firestone and it is a wind, water, abrasion resistant fabric, which helps repel water from soaking the insulation. The bottom of the bag is made with a taffeta shell to resist abrasion more since it will be the area that the most wear and tear will happen to. The lining on the inside is made from Pertex Silken, which feels nicer on the skin than most nylon fabrics.

Included with the Cats Meow was a simple nylon stuff sack, which I find barely fits the bag and required work to get the bag in it at all. The bag also came with a mesh storage bag, to encourage users not to keep the bag compressed for long periods of time, a great idea since storing a sleeping bag in its stuff sack will affect the loft and temperature ratings adversely in the long run.

Field Information

Location:  Multiple Use Area, New Paltz, New York. Pharaoh Lake Wilderness Area, Adirondack State Park, New York. Bucklin Trail, Killington, Vermont. West Rim Trail, Ansonia, Pennsylvania.

Terrain: The areas I’ve used this bag all have a very similar terrain and foliage covering. They were all very wooded areas, and very rocky due to glacial deposits.

Weather Conditions: I’ve used this bag in a full three-season manner. It has seen me through temperatures ranging from 95° F (35° C) to 25° F (-3.9° C). Some trips I did not see a drop of rain, or have any condensation on the tent walls to deal with, while on others it rained for ten days straight, and condensation would drip down the tent walls constantly.

Field Experience: One of the major reasons I purchased this bag was because it was a lightweight synthetic. I do the majority of my camping in Pennsylvania and New York. These areas make me frequently deal with humidity and rain, so the gear I bring with me has to be able to handle these conditions as well.

My initial opinions of this bag were quite favorable. Features I liked immediately were the watch pocket, and the draw cords for the hood. Though there were a couple things that I wasn’t thrilled about after the first night I slept in the bag. My first trip with this bag was to Shawangunk, New York. I was there on a rock-climbing trip the first week of June, and the temperatures were ranging from 60° F (15.5° C) to 80° F (26.7° C). There was quite a storm on the second night we stayed there, which cause the temperatures to drop to 47° F (8.3° C).

The pillow pocket did not perform as well as I expected. The clothes I had stuffed into it managed to make their way to the sides of the hood where they bothered me, and there they did not pad my head like they were supposed to. I gave up on using it after the first night. The other thing I was not impressed with was the restriction of the foot box of the bag. When I had gotten in the bag at the store, it seemed snug, but after a warm night my feet were not comfortable at all. I really did not enjoy having to keep them so close together all night. The bag has a girth of 40 in (102 cm) in the foot box. I wear a size 10 US (43 Europe) boot, which is a pretty medium size foot, but I enjoy more room in this area of my sleeping bag. The first night was cool enough to need a sleeping bag, but warm enough to make the Cats Meow bag overkill for the temperature. I wound up waking several times in the night to adjust to the temperature. I would wake up hot, and open the zipper from the bottom and top, then wake up cold from the draft an hour later.

The next night we encountered a tropical storm and it rained very heavily from 11pm to about 5am. We had been camped in a multiple use camping area, not far from our cars, but the area is a very popular camping spot for the climbing area we were visiting, and is used almost every night from April through October. The area is impacted from heavy use and as a result has spots that look ideal for a tent to go, but they are actually low spots that form into puddles when it rains. I was cooking dinner while my tent mate pitched the tent and got camp set up. I got my Therm-a-Rest and Cats Meow and tossed it in the tent, not really inspecting the spot it was pitched on. We retired to the tent when it started to rain, and I had another night of trying to deal with regulating the temperature in the bag. About 4am I woke to a very cold breeze coming in the zipper I had opened at the bottom of my bag and I realized our tent seemed to be floating in a puddle. A true testament to bathtub floors, we were still dry, though very obviously lying in a pool of water. When I woke my tent mate, we decided to get out and try and move the tent to a dryer spot. Upon trying to exit the tent, I soaked my bag when the water rushed onto the floor. The whole area was flooded from the heavy rain and we retired to the car, I was glad to have a synthetic bag this morning since it had gotten quite cool, and I still needed something to keep me warm for a couple more hours. My thermometer read 47° F (8.3° C). The insulation did not seem to be affected by the fact that it was wet. Though it wasn’t as comfortable as before, I did sleep well for the next couple of hours. While I usually take greater care in where I set up my tent, this situation was exactly the reason I bought this bag. I knew at some point I would get my bag wet when I really needed it to keep me warm, and I was happy with the performance.

Warmer weather trips seemed to not be ideal for this bag unless I was sleeping in my hammock, which required more insulation to keep me warm. I used this bag when I took my hammock to the Pharaoh Lake Wilderness area, and slept great in it despite the humid environment. Sleeping in a hammock really compresses the insulation where you are lying on it, but with this bag I found that even with the insulation underneath me compressed it still kept me warm. I suspect this has to do with the bag not being very breathable which I’ll talk more about later.

My time spent on the Bucklin Trail in Vermont was another real test for this bag. I was camped at a higher elevation, at about 3000 ft (914 m), for two weeks during July 2003. I was working on the Long Trail Patrol doing trail maintenance, and we had set up a base camp we would use for those two weeks. The first week we saw a couple nights of rain, and I slept well with the bag zipped, and the hood open. One thing I noticed during this trip was that the bottom of the bag was slippery, and I kept sliding down my tent, since it was on a slight incline. My Therm-a-Rest is a non-slip kind and I kept finding myself down at the bottom of my tent when I woke up. The second week we were there it rained every single day. This was part of a weather system coming through, and the rain was heavy at times, but mostly just a steady rain that never seemed to stop. I was using a two-man three-season tent with large vestibules that had served me well on many trips, and had kept me dry through some rough storms, but it had never had to deal with this kind of situation before. One thing that affected my sleeping bag was the amount of condensation that was forming inside the tent. This never happened like this to me before, I suspect because I had never been using my tent in the same spot night after night like this, so I wasn’t sure what to do to fix it. The tent had very little ventilation with the vestibules zipped shut. The constant rain all day long, meant that I had to keep these zipped up or else I would get the inside of my tent soaked. With the vestibules open, as I usually left them, condensation never seemed to form, but this week, the inside of my rain fly seemed to stay wet all the time. I left these doors open whenever I could but the rain was very constant this week, so they spent most of the time closed.

The rain falling of the roof of my tent would knock the condensation off, and splash it through the mesh body onto my Cats Meow. By mid-way through the week, the bag was very wet, and there was no way to dry it out, since the rain was constant, and humidity was high.

Others on the trip who had chosen to bring a down bag were complaining of being very cold in their bags at night, and were having to sleep in all their clothing in order to get any sleep at all. Sleeping did become less enjoyable because of the wet fabric against my skin, but I still stayed very warm at night despite sleeping in a wet bag.

I’ve used this bag a lot in the past two years and there is really only one more trip where there was anything out of the ordinary to report. This trip was to the West Rim Trail of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon in late October 2003. This was a thirty-three mile (53 km) backpacking trip, on which I would be tenting by myself. On past trips like these I’ve either carried my hammock or just took my 6 lb (2.7 kg) two-man tent with me. I checked the weather and it looked like rain was a real possibility. My hammock offered no way to keep a cooking area dry, but I hated to have to carry my whole tent since it was so heavy. I decided to bring my tent in its “fast-pack” mode, which was just the fly and ground cloth. It saved me about half of the weight, and I am able to have a dry place to live and even cook with this method. During the trip it started raining every night about 6pm, and lasted through the night. This meant keeping those vestibule doors zipped all the way shut, and once again condensation formed on the tent. While I now knew the Cats Meow would keep me warm if wet, I was still concerned because the temperatures at night were dropping quite a bit so I wore a hat to bed. The first night I woke several times, until I put on some thermal underwear. The second night I took the thermal underwear with me into the bag, and when I woke the first time I put it on and slept fine the rest of the night. The temperatures for these nights never went below the freezing point, and the fact that I was getting cold before reaching the temperature the sleeping bag was supposed to be rated to kind of annoyed me. The last night the temperature dropped to 25° F (-3.9° C) according to my zipper thermometer, and I had to not only put on thermal underwear, but also my fleece pants to stay warm. Without the mesh walls of the tent, the condensation from the tent walls seemed to be falling onto my bag a lot easier than before. Since I was taking the tent down every day, and drying my gear out during the good weather we experienced during the day, my bag did not really get that wet. The shell was becoming wet to the touch, but I don’t think much water was being absorbed. I had noticed on this trip that my bag did not seem to have as much loft as I remembered it having new. When I took it out of the compression sack, I tried to fluff it up, but I could tell that the loft was still less than it was in the past. I think a combination of my bag being damp from condensation and it not being as lofty as it was new is the reason I was getting cold on this trip

I think that at this point my Cats Meow might be starting to lose its loft. I have always stored it in the included storage bag, and try to fluff it up when I lay it out in my tent, but visually it does not appear to have as much loft as before. I have been using a compression sack for this bag, and I think that might be the cause of the premature loft loss. The included stuff sack was difficult to use, so I went with a larger compression sack, which was easier to stuff, and could more easily fit the sleeping bag into my small pack. I have heard some talk about not using these types of stuff sacks because they damage the loft, but never from an official site, and many companies include these compression sacks with the bulkier cold weather bags so I disregarded the advice against them.

Another thing about this bag that I’ve found it that the insulation does not appear to breath very well. It does a good job of insulating, but I seemed to have difficulty using it when I was well outside of the temperature range. The insulation trapped the heat too well when I tried to use it in warmer temperatures. I realize this is why bags have different temperature ratings, but I had used a down bag rated to the same temperature, which seemed to breath better making it more comfortable to use when the weather was warmer than expected. The Cats Meow did make sleeping in my hammock more comfortable. Even though the insulation was compressed the cold did not seem to penetrate the bag very easily, and I slept better using this bag than I did using a down bag of the same temperature rating.

Summary

My first opinions of this bag were really positive. I liked some of the features immediately, such as the draft tube and hood adjustment cords, while other features like the watch pocket I didn’t appreciate until I used them a couple times. Early morning starts were made easier when I actually woke up when my alarm went off thanks to that little pocket. Not everything about the bag was as great as I first thought though. The foot box certainly didn’t have enough room for me to be comfortable, especially when I tried to put some clothing at the bottom to change into in the morning. The pillow pocket never seemed to work well for me either.

The whole reason I was drawn to this bag was because it was the only 20° F (-6° C) rated bag that was using the new Polarguard Delta, which made it light and promised better compression than the other synthetic insulations that were being used at the time. Trying to keep my pack small and light, most synthetic bags didn’t compress down small enough for me to consider, but this one did live up to its reputation. My experience with the Cats Meow sleeping bag has certainly given me some good insight as to how synthetic insulation can be more forgiving than down. I’m not a person to cancel a trip because of the weather report, and my entire reason for buying a synthetic bag was that I needed a sleeping bag that could keep me warm if it got wet. The times my Cats Meow got wet, I was happy with the performance of the insulation. I managed to stay warm and get sleep when others camping with me using down suffered through the night. Overall the bag has done everything I wanted it to do, and while I think I damaged the loft due to the manner I stored the bag, I have been happy with my purchase.

Reviews > Sleep Gear > Sleeping Bags > TNF Cats Meow > Owner Review by Matt Mauceri