u/longwalktonowhere

Selling a Western Mountaineering Megalite from 2024. Can ship within the EU (at buyer’s cost) or do a personal handover in The Netherlands. While the Megalite has been a perfect 3 season bag for me, I recently got an Astralite quilt of equivalent warmth that’s easier to use in my hammock.

The Megalite comes complete with its stuff sack and long term storage bag. This is the 6ft/183cm version with the zipper on the left side. I’m 183cm and it fits me perfectly.

On my kitchen scale, the bag weighs 680gr. Western Mountaineering is known to offer their products with their true comfort temperatures, and the Megalite is listed at -2C.

Have sold Western Mountaineering here before with reference.

More info on the WM website: https://www.westernmountaineering.com/product/megalite/

Photos: https://imgur.com/a/k9PC9pX

About a year and a half ago, I slept several nights in a hammock in the jungle of Suriname and a beach in Colombia. This got me thinking - wouldn’t camping in a hammock while hiking have certain advantages over camping in a tent? I had never come across someone on the trails with a hammock, so that’s when I started my online research.

The options at first seemed quite overwhelming, but after watching some Shug videos, and reading the innumerable helpful contributions from r/hammockcamping residents u/kullulu, u/cannaeoflife, and others, I decided to go for it.

My set up:

Superior Gear Elite 30F with superior suspension system
Warbonnet Minifly (woodland camo)
Dutchware snakeskin
2x Dutchware Stingerz
6x Dutchware tarpworms

After a few garden hangs, I just went on my first hammock hiking trip, the Great Glen Way in Scotland. It quickly turned out that this is hammock country. You can almost hang everywhere! My hiking companion was using my X-Mid 1 Solid though, which limited our campsites considerably. We camped right on the shores of Loch Lochy and Loch Oich, in a forest close to Loch Ness, and in the heather not far from Inverness. We broke up the no shower wild camping routine with a night in the superbly located Loch Ness Hostel.

We were very lucky with the weather, not much rain. Overnight lows ranged from 5 - 12.5C.

Quite a bit of fiddling with the hammock and tarp, especially at spots with uneven ground and crooked trees. This is at least in part to do with my relative inexperience, but nothing beats the speed of setting up the X-Mid (Stakes - chop, chop, chop, chop. Poles - boom, boom. Done).

Once I had a perfect hang, only to realize that the stingerz weren’t long enough to hang the tarp. One of many lessons learnt! There were a few stony beaches with trees where I would have loved to hang, so I will look into anchoring my tarp with stones (will likely need some additional lengths of guy line to add to the tarpworms lines). The snakeskin is very handy - I would first tension and stake down the tarp, then disconnect the tarpworms from the paracord loops on the tarp, and the make the tarp disappear in seconds. It was back up in less than a minute when rain did eventually start.

What’s next? My partner would like to try hammock camping as well, so we’ll be getting another set-up. Leaning towards the Dutchware Hellbender 20F and Warbonnet Mountainfly (shadow pine camo), to also get some options on solo trips. I will also start playing around with the Superior Gear Elite suspension, as it’s considerably lighter (78gr vs. 218gr).

More long term (in several years), I hope to do a thru hike, likely baekdudaegan which has a pretty extreme elevation profile and serious water carries. But until that time there will be plenty of weekend and weeklong adventures to find out my hammock preferences regarding weight, ease of use, and durability.

Thank you all for your wisdom and help!