Feathered Friends Egret UL 20 - Women's Review

This warm and cozy bag will keep you performing at your best in the backcountry thanks to high-quality, 950+ down fill, within a women's specific fit. Because this is one of the warmest and lightest bags we tested, it is a great choice for traveling long distances in the mountains between Spring and Fall. If you're somewhere where the weather can be unpredictable and often cold, the Egret will be a trusted friend. We recommend it for long backpacking trips where keeping your weight down is essential, but you need something warm — the Pacific Crest Trail is a perfect example. That said, it's not the best option as a warm-weather bag as the fill is too warm to be comfortable, especially at lower elevations when overnight temps don't drop. It may also not be the right choice for trips in humid or rainy climates, where synthetic is likely more reliable. While its price is a little steep, the Egret offers the best warmth to weight ratio and high-quality performance you can rely on through all three seasons.

Warmth

The Egret is not EN rated, so it is tricky to compare with the other products we tested with an EN temperature rating. However, after our extensive testing period, we can attest to the outstanding performance of its 950+ down fill. This bag puffs up huge and retains the heat in its lofty filling, delivering a substantially higher warmth-to-weight ratio than many others. The Egret also has continuous baffles that are open from bottom to top, allowing you to shake and/or reposition all the down filling from the underside of the bag to the top. This will ensure you maximize all the down to create warmth, especially on cold nights (assuming you have a warm sleeping pad).

We were curious why Feathered Friends chooses not to EN test their bags, a common spec among competing manufacturers, so we contacted them to find out. Here is what they said:

We appreciate the experience Feathered Friends brings to their designs and agree that the Egret is slightly warmer than other bags that were EN rated to 20 degrees. The only problem we encountered with warmth is tied to sizing. One of our testers is 5'5", and she found the 5'9" bag too long to make the best use of the design, as it left a space for cold air to collect in the foot box that she was too short to fill. She ended up stuffing clothes inside to fill up that space to stay warm on cool autumn nights in the mountains. That's not an ideal scenario for every user, so something to consider when assessing options and sizes. The Egret also comes in a smaller size at 5'3", which is great because there are not many products offered for folks in that shorter range. Most women's products come in an average size of 5'6" (and “short” unisex sizes are sized to this dimension). If you're taller than, you may want to consider a unisex bag. However, with the Egret, taller women also have the 5'9" option.

Another concern when it comes to warmth is that down fill bags, such as the Egret, aren't the best choice for humid, rainy environments. Tester Trish Matheny spent a full month on an expedition in Chile, where she slept in the Egret daily. She found it struggled a bit in the moisture, saying: “While I was ultimately impressed with the bag's performance, I often woke up to dew on top of the bag after an open bivy. This resulted in the down packing out a little faster than I would have hoped, and created a colder sleeping environment during the final days of my trip.”

Weight

The Egret is a super lightweight option at 1.72 pounds (27.5 ounces). While a few others come close, only one came in lighter, a pleasant surprise considering how much warm down it's stuffed with. It's one of the lightest bags we've tested and at the top of our list for its warmth-to-weight ratio.

Due to this lightweight and packable design, the Egret UL 20 is a fantastic option for trucking around on multi-day backpacking adventures into the mountains.

Comfort

The Egret is extremely comfortable. It has a standard mummy shape that is quite roomy, providing more space for your legs and shoulders to move around. We didn't feel claustrophobic or constricted, except when fully enclosed with a cinched-down hood on particularly windy nights. The high-power fill is super lofty and cozy, swaddling your body for excellent all-night comfort, even including a down baffle that covers the zipper's length, increasing warmth and comfort.

One complaint that came up was about noise. “I couldn't help but notice that the shell fabric is pretty noisy,” says one tester. "My tent mates complained that this bag, paired with the Therm-a-Rest NeoAir XLite Women's sleeping pad I was using, sounded like I was sleeping in a bag of Sun Chips." While the shell material makes this annoying crinkly noise fresh out of the box, we found that the situation improves over time. One other minor complaint: we were a little disappointed in the shape of the hood, wishing it were slightly deeper to cup the head a bit more. It felt a little shallow, often allowing our inflatable pillow to move, ending up outside the bag. A deeper enclosure with more coverage (without requiring a fully cinched hood) would be nice for really cold nights.

Packed Size

Given that the Egret is so lofty with so much down packed into its baffles, the compressed size is slightly larger than some of its competitors. It is sold with a small-ish stuff sack to pack it in, but can also be compressed even smaller using a secondary compression sack. This can be essential for space savings on longer trips, and something we'd highly recommend if such a trip is driving your purchase decisions.

The fact that this high-quality bag is sold with only a stuff bag rather than a compression bag is our chief complaint when it comes to packability. We borrowed a compression sack from another bag in our lineup for our tester's expedition to Chile. It allowed us to pack the Egret down to almost half the size of the stuff bag before stowing it away. When carrying everything from food to ropes to climbing gear on your back, this space savings creates more room for other important things you'll need on your trip, like coffee and chocolate.

Features

This bag's lack of extra features is a notable design choice. The Egret does not have fancy bells and whistles as some others now offer for comfort or convenience. While some shoppers may love such versatility in design, we think some products are overbuilt and now include features that are not particularly useful to most shoppers and make products unnecessarily heavy. The Egret's top-quality materials and superior construction are its best features, including the option to move all the down in the bag to the top.

An extremely burly zipper seems a bit overkill, but the biggest complaint across user reviews for sleeping bags is often a zipper problem. Small zippers often catch on shell material, causing headaches when entering or leaving the bag. Feathered Friends has discovered a way to ensure this doesn't happen on the Egret. It's #5 YKK two-way, separating zipper with locking sliders, and a heavy-duty zipper liner makes it virtually impossible to catch any fabric when you zip. Other models still feature zippers that seem to snag at the most inopportune times, so this is a welcome effort to resolve a fairly common complaint. The zip guard fabric is among the contributors that create its unpleasant “crinkly Sun Chip bag” sound effect, but for many, a functional zipper is a worthy tradeoff.

Should You Buy the Feathered Friends Egret UL 20?

The Egret is one of the most expensive bags in this review, and we think it's worth every penny. It's worth saving up a little longer for such a super functional and versatile bag, knowing it will last you a long time with proper care. This high-quality product consists of top-of-the-line materials, and the manufacturer is an industry leader that has earned a reputation for reliable, long-lasting products. The Egret is warm, cozy, and comfortable, making it our favorite sleeping bag for weight-conscious backpacking trips in the mountains when cold nights are likely.

What Other Sleeping Bags Should You Consider?

While the Egret is by far and away one of our favorite sleeping bags we have tested, and it will keep you cozy for many years to come if you take care of it, we understand if the price is daunting. For those who don't backpack often and need to stick within a budget, the Sierra Designs Get Down 20 is a worthy down bag to consider. Similarly, the The North Face Cat's Meow is an affordable synthetic option that works great in moist environments if you are not faced with carrying the bag for long distances. If top-tier performance is all you care about, another great option is the Mountain Hardwear Phantom 15, a unisex design with 800 fill down that our testers found to be eve a little warmer than the Egret thanks to smaller measurements in the hips, a black fabric interior to harness the power of the sun, and a 15D nylon ripstop exterior that better withstood humid climates. The Western Mountaineering AlpinLite tops our list of favorites among high-end goose down sleeping bags, due to its superior cut, open baffles, high loft, and substantial neck insulation to keep you cozy during cold nights under the stars.