Sleeping bag with a rating of at least 5 C is required when summer backpacking in Canadian Rockies, as temperature drops to around 0 C at night. A rating of -7 C is a must if you venture further into above treeline campgrounds.
These ratings are good so long as your sleeping bag is dry even during rain outside your tent. This didn't happen last weekend when we did backpacking at the Yoho National Park. What made it worse was I took my nine-year old son with us as well.
The rain poured for 4 hours non-stop. Our tent footprint didn't protect our tent from floor seepage, instead it ended up collecting water from the fly and channeled it to the tent floor. We could feel water pockets right under the tent floor which was flooded in less than 1 hour.
The first thing we saved was our sleeping bags. One was getting wet fast. The second thing was warm clothing. Our socks were soaked. Things were not good at all.
We decided to move our stuff out of the tent and to a hut in our campground. We were completely soaked. The fireplace there helped dry our stuff, which took 2 hours. We ended up cooking in the hut with a company of other backpackers who couldn't cook outside as well due to heavy rain. Two other groups experienced tent flooding even worse than us. We all told our stories and the evening turned out great in the end.
It was a trade-off we sought. We wanted a view of majestic waterfall and picked a low lying tent site. When the heavy rain came, we paid the price. I had to move our tent to another site and the rain finally stopped.
The rain gave a beautiful mist shroud to the waterfall. A moment of trouble became a beautiful weekend to remember.
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