WOOL: THE CAMPER'S NATURAL FRIEND

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On our first hitchhiking trip together, my partner A1 and I carried low-cost fiberfillinsulated sleeping bags. (We simply couldn't afford goose-down bags and knew that the feathery stuffing loses its warmth-giving properties when it gets wet, anyway.) Pulling out of Fairbanks, Alaska in September, we roamed down the Pacific coast as far south as San Francisco. After Golden Gate country, we decided to indulge ourselves, and took a bus to Ohio. From there we went back to thumb power while traveling to Florida and Connecticut and then homeward through Maine and across Canada. We reached Fairbanks with the first leaves of spring.

As you can imagine, we encountered some pretty wild climatic changes on that journey. And while our fiberfill bags were all right sometimes, they were excessively hot or cold much too often, frequently damp, always bulky, and-worst of all-they wouldn't zip together to make a double bed. We learned quite a few things on that trek, not the least of which was that we needed to look for new ways to achieve sleeping comfort.

For the next couple of years we lived on an island in Alaska's inland waterway, outside of Sitka. There, the rain-forest climate provided new lessons. Most important, the cold, wet weather tutored us in the benefits of dressing in-and sleeping under-wool . . . the lightweight, rugged, nonbulky, natural insulating material that holds in body heat even when it's soaking wet. Luckily, we'd bought a stack of wool blankets (for a buck each!) at a factory outlet some years before, and you can believe we put them to good use during those long north-country winters!

At any rate, the next time we came down with a bad collective case of itchy feet, we'd wised up enough in the ways of warmth and comfort to substitute wool for the heavier, bulkier, and all-around less satisfactory synthetics-filled clothing and sleeping bags we'd lugged through our first journey. So, in preparation for the upcoming travel adventure, I grabbed four of our blankets, an inchwide roll of Velcro-type tape, and my sewing kit . . .and set to work. Before long, AI and I had not only the double bag we'd missed so much on our first trip, but also comfy wool ponchos.

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