Therm-a-Rest NeoAir All Season Mattress Wins Backpacker Editors Choice

Seattle, U.S.A. – Therm-a-Rest, the Seattle-based industry leader in premium outdoor comfort, has been honored as a recipient of the 2011 Backpacker magazine Editors’ Choice Snow Award, the most prestigious award in the outdoor industry. The NeoAir All Season mattress received the award for its outstanding innovation in design, materials and performance.

The Therm-a-Rest NeoAir All Season mattress is one of only nine winners chosen for the first-ever Editors’ Choice Snow Award from a field of hundreds. Using the same rigorous gear testing practices as the annual Editors’ Choice Awards announced in the spring, the Editors’ Choice Snow Awards ensure that the performance of the winners is truly worthy of distinction and meets the guiding principle behind the program: gear that is of real value to the readers of Backpacker magazine, who are very active, long-term outdoor enthusiasts.

“There’s no other magazine or website that conducts in-depth field-testing as vigorously or impartially as the crew led by Gear Editor Kristin Hostetter,” says Backpacker Editor-in-Chief Jon Dorn. “With a core team that has several centuries of combined trail time and expertise in every backcountry discipline, Kristin puts products through an unprecedented level of real-world abuse in every terrain and weather imaginable, including snow and ice. Because of that, extending the coveted Editors’ Choice Awards to account for the winter season allows us to lead consumers to even more products that show best-in-class performance.” 

The NeoAir All Season mattress utilizes an effective combination of patent-pending multi-layer Reflective Barrier™ and Triangular Core Matrix™ technologies to dramatically boost warmth by minimizing thermal heat transfer. The multiple Reflective Barrier layers work together to reduce conductive heat loss to the ground, while radiating heat back to the user. The Triangular Core Matrix technology creates a matrix of hundreds of individual cells in the mattress, limiting convective heat loss and providing an internal truss system that eliminates the instability generally found on air mattresses. The result is a comfortable all-season mattress that one Backpacker tester called “the biggest upgrade in winter camping since down booties,” admitting, “I honestly might start sleeping on it at my house.”

“Receiving this award is an incredible honor,” said Doug Jacot, Vice-President of Therm-a-Rest. “Our goal is to provide the most comfortable night’s sleep so people can get the most out of their day and we’re proud to make a lightweight air mattress that accomplishes that in every season.”

Therm-a-Rest previously received a Backpacker Editors’ Choice Award in 2009 for the NeoAir™ mattress, and an honorary Editors’ Choice Gold Award in 2003 for the brand itself. The Therm-a-Rest NeoAir All Season mattress is available in stores now.

The complete list of Backpacker 2011 Editors’ Choice Snow Award winners is available in the magazine’s Fall Gear Guide issue, available on newsstands now.

About Therm-a-Rest

Seattle-based Therm-a-Rest has been the market leader in premium outdoor comfort since its invention of the world’s first self-inflating mattress in 1972. A commitment to providing inventive, long-lasting and reliable products has driven the expansion of the line into closed-cell foam mattresses, air mattresses, sleep systems and seating solutions that reinvent the way people sleep outside. All Therm-a-Rest® mattresses are made in the Seattle, U.S.A. and Cork, Ireland manufacturing facilities. For more information, visit www.thermarest.com.

About Backpacker:

Backpacker (www.backpacker.com) brings the outdoors straight to the reader’s doorstep, inspiring and enabling them to go more places and enjoy nature more often. The authority on active adventure, Backpacker is the world’s first GPS-enabled magazine and website, and the only outdoor media whose editors personally test the hiking trails, camping gear, and survival tips they publish. Backpacker’s Editors’ Choice Awards, an industry honor recognizing design, feature and product innovation has become the gold standard against which all other outdoor-industry awards are measured. And the magazine recently launched mobile media applications that allow users to text-message hiking maps and directions to their phones. In the last four years, Backpacker has won five National Magazine Awards, the publishing industry’s highest honor. In 2008, the magazine won the NMA for General Excellence, joining The New Yorker, Mother Jones, GQ, and National Geographic as top winners in their respective size categories. In 2009, it won three awards, including General Excellence Online. Backpacker has also won numerous other print, design, and digital awards, and its writers have been recognized in prestigious contests and best-of-the-year anthologies.

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