[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
‐ I don't plan to be here for three weeks.
I plan to be here for three months.
But I want a nice home in which to live.
Brilliant.
‐ What am I gonna find out about myself?
That's the biggest thing, is to see if I am the man
that I think I am.
Oh, yeah. That is a bull trout.
‐ My boat is a high risk.
This could be a decision
that costs me the whole experience.
It's tippy as hell.
Hey, bear! [bear growls]
‐ If I don't succeed,
have I just put a speed bump in life?
Come on! Come on!
[laughing] Yeah!
Unbelievable!
♪ ♪
narrator: In "Alone's" most terrifying location yet,
ten participants face the deadliest predator
in North America...
‐ There here is, right there.
‐ Grizzly bears. Hey, bear!
‐ There's a lot of grizzly here.
I'm gonna have to live with them.
‐ Go on! Get!
‐ Every second we're on the land,
we're being hunted.
‐ Holy [bleep], mountain lion.
‐ He's circling around my shelter.
narrator: Bone‐chilling cold...
‐ Winter is coming.
‐ You combine the wind with the rain and the cold,
this place could make the Arctic look easy.
‐ Oh, [bleep].
narrator: And complete isolation.
‐ You cannot hide from yourself,
mentally and emotionally.
‐ Ahh! ‐ There's no place to go.
‐ I am suffering from loneliness.
narrator: Who will survive?
‐ Yes! Yes!
‐ This could be the end.
‐ I don't want to tap, but I don't want to die either.
‐ You have to suffer before you can succeed.
‐ [retches]
narrator: The last one standing wins.
‐ At what point do I touch the button?
♪ ♪
‐ Hmm, I'm gonna set that over here
'cause that'll definitely dry.
Smoking the underwear might not be all bad.
One more try at warming my butt up,
and then I'll have my cup of tea.
All right.
It's mostly my butt that's cold.
♪ ♪
Today is‐‐it's a windy day.
It's not a day to think about fishing,
so we will get back to working on the shelter.
Cool, so I guess the best analogy for this, then,
is that we've basically framed the house,
and now we get to shingle.
We're gonna go around and collect
all of the big sheets of bark
that are just lying on the forest floor.
♪ ♪
All over is this fir.
When it dies, it leaves these big huge sheets of bark,
which is pretty awesome.
So when I say shingle,
this is what I mean.
♪ ♪
‐ The one limitation that I've probably most often run into
in sort of these long‐term living situations
would be my size,
and it is an advantage in the sense that, you know,
you can function on a fairly low number of calories,
lower than perhaps bigger people require.
However, it does limit how much you can carry,
how many trips you need to do.
You know, you need to do five trips
when someone else can do two.
It limits how much physical activity
you can really knock out in a day.
♪ ♪
These shingles will have to overlap,
but we start at the bottom and go all the way around,
and then we do another layer halfway up,
and then we put pine duff on
to fill in any of the fragments,
provides a little bit of insulation.
♪ ♪
There's so many reasons I want to make a pit house.
They are incredibly efficient at keeping in heat,
and I cannot play fattest‐man‐wins game.
♪ ♪
I need a house where, when I'm in it,
no extra calories are being burned
because if you have a lot of wind on your fire,
it just eats through firewood.
Oof.
All right, so if I sit on the stair,
you can sort of see the skylight and the interior.
And then this is our next big project:
the fireplace and chimney.
That's definitely in the cards,
but that is a bloody fantastic day's work.
That's what that is.
♪ ♪
‐ Here it comes.
♪ ♪
Lovely.
♪ ♪
Get some vitamin D released
in this tiny patch of skin.
♪ ♪
It's amazing.
♪ ♪
I feel like I'm back in Hawaii,
yet a lot colder and windier.
♪ ♪
It's been five days since I've had any meat at all,
and I want to fish, but the wind is relentless.
I can't get my set lines to stay out
because the waves just push them right back to shore.
I need to get my line out further,
so I have an idea for a pier.
The longest driftwoods
that I see on my beach are about 30 feet,
so my plan is to build something where I can
just walk out at least 25 feet and drop a line.
That offers me potential in bad weather.
I can go out on my pier anytime,
and I need deep water come winter
because the fish are gonna push off.
They're not gonna stay in the shallows.
♪ ♪
Very nice.
Nice for a pier‐sized peg.
♪ ♪
I want to utilize engineering
instead of just building with logs
and trying to tie that together with cordage,
so I want to put together kind of a dovetail peg system.
♪ ♪
One done! I like it.
Next!
[as Arnold Schwarzenegger] Get to the chopper!
[shouts as Arnold]
My son does a better Arnold impression.
♪ ♪
I have a wonderful family of seven,
my wife and five kids.
When I'm successful at this challenge
and I get the money,
we can set sail, literally.
My wife has the idea that we'll buy a boat
and we'll hit the seas.
That would be awesome.
♪ ♪
I reckon that's deep enough to catch a fish.
All right.
I'll give you one guess which way the wind's blowing.
Let's straighten it out.
Nope.
It just comes right off of those snow‐covered
glacier mountains.
I'm debating on waiting another day for the winds
and waves to calm down to set this.
That's the logical thing to do.
♪ ♪
‐ Can you see it behind me, over my shoulder?
I can't tell, but it's back there.
Right about here.
Maybe here? No. Here.
You can see my boat in the background.
Sweetness.
♪ ♪
I've been working on building a boat.
It's floating great, seems pretty solid,
but it's not stable.
It's very tippy, so I built outriggers
so I have something coming off the boat
that gives stability.
So it's another point of contact on the water,
so if you lean one way or lean the other,
you have now multiple holds touching the water,
and they give you kickback, and they hold you up.
All right.
You ready for the finished product?
♪ ♪
I built these outriggers just like I built the boat,
so I have a frame, a fir frame,
and I have ribs that are of alder, green alder,
and thankfully, I had scrap tarp material
to cover it with.
Let's go get on the water.
♪ ♪
I think boats are a high‐value and a high‐risk entity.
It is very dangerous to be out here,
but if this works and it's dependable and safe,
I think it's gonna give me an edge
because I can get to places
where the fish are migrating or moving through,
so I'm not just limited to the bank.
Oh!
♪ ♪
Yeah!
♪ ♪
We're stable.
We're cruising.
Yes, yes, yes.
♪ ♪
Whoo!
♪ ♪
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
♪ ♪
Big success.
Love it.
♪ ♪
That was awesome. I'm gonna enjoy this moment.
I haven't showered since I've been out here.
I want to get in the water so bad and clean myself.
♪ ♪
I love this lifestyle,
living by the Earth and the land.
Oof!
The pride and the fulfillment when things work,
when your shelter works, when your boat works,
when your bow drill works.
♪ ♪
It gives you so much joy,
and I want to keep living it.
Whoo! [laughs]
♪ ♪
Oh, that's refreshing.
♪ ♪
Oh.
Holy, [bleep].
There's a grizz walking down the beach.
♪ ♪
Hey, bear! No!
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
‐ Hey, bear!
♪ ♪
Hey, bear! [clapping]
Hey!
He hasn't even stopped. He's still walking this way.
♪ ♪
Hey, bear! No!
♪ ♪
I can't believe I'm [bleep] naked,
and a bear is freaking right there.
I'm gonna have fire some bangers.
[popping]
♪ ♪
Nothing.
It's not good.
Hey, bear! No!
♪ ♪
Man, I just got my boat done,
and I don't want him to shred it.
♪ ♪
Hey, bear!
No!
♪ ♪
No!
♪ ♪
[bleep]. He's coming.
[popping]
♪ ♪
Come on.
Get out of here.
♪ ♪
Hey, bear! No!
♪ ♪
Hey, bear!
I'm over here!
[claps]
Nothing I seem to do seems to scare him off.
♪ ♪
Hey, bear!
[clapping]
♪ ♪
Hey, bear!
♪ ♪
Ah, [bleep]! Hey!
[claps]
♪ ♪
Hey, bear!
Hello!
♪ ♪
[popping]
I think he's out of here.
Holy [bleep]. That was insane.
I need to get clothes on.
♪ ♪
The bear encounter today definitely got me
taking it a little more seriously.
♪ ♪
He didn't really care about me yelling, throwing rocks.
Even the bear bangers, he was pretty indifferent.
I'm in his territory, and I'm the foreigner here,
and he just put me in my place.
Literally, if it decided for some reason‐‐
it was hungry, it was stressed,
it was distressed‐‐
there's nothing stopping it.
If it wanted to at that moment,
your life is gone.
♪ ♪
‐ [sighs]
No fish this morning, but luckily,
I've still got plenty of smoked trout.
Just look at that.
All these nice, thin strips.
It is so unbelievably good.
It doesn't need any seasoning or anything.
♪ ♪
I've never wired together a stick door before.
So it's all a little new to me.
♪ ♪
I've got a real cabin. I want a real door.
Psychologically, I don't want to feel like
I'm on a camping trip.
Oh, yeah.
I want someplace that feels like home,
something that has permanence to it.
I just feel like it's gonna help me
stick around long‐term.
Now I need to make some hinges for the wall,
which is not easy considering
I don't have any way to drill a hole,
so I'm going to get creative with that.
♪ ♪
In typical fashion, I had not preplanned anything.
I just know I want a door on hinges.
♪ ♪
Then I realized that I could use my saw
to cut a notch
and continually widen that notch
to create almost, like, a hole,
but it would work for a hinge.
It's like that?
I was able to find some alder branches around
that have 90‐degree bends that I wired onto the door.
Alder is very strong for its size,
and it has a little bit of flex to it,
so it's not going to break.
♪ ♪
It's not the most elegant...
But I have a door.
As I'm putting all this together,
I'm constantly thinking, like,
"What if my wife was out here?"
Well, she would want it neat and clean,
and she would want a place to hang things.
She would want something nice.
♪ ♪
All right. I'm gonna make a door latch.
♪ ♪
I'm thinking I can make a latch
that will go in and turn and lock behind the logs.
♪ ♪
Yeah.
There we go.
Did I spend way too long on it?
Absolutely I did, but here is my door.
Knock, knock. Can I come in?
Okay. Cool.
Look at that.
It's actually pretty [bleep] kickass.
♪ ♪
‐ It was about 10:00 last night.
I don't know why I woke up, for some reason.
That's rare.
But dead calm.
No wind. No waves.
It stayed that way all night until about 6:30.
And then it just started blowing,
and the waves started crashing,
so I think we're just gonna go for it.
That means we're putting the pier in,
wind or waves be damned.
♪ ♪
I've got to get off this shoreline to catch fish.
I'm running down on my last bit of body fat.
If I get the pier planks on it,
that should be enough to hold everything in place,
and then I can shimmy out there
and set a set line.
Then we'll start catching fish.
♪ ♪
It's a 1,000 foot deep lake.
Glacier‐fed,
so the temperature is insanely cold.
♪ ♪
[exhales deeply]
♪ ♪
[grunts]
[exhales sharply]
♪ ♪
Oh.
[grunting]
[bleep].
♪ ♪
What the [bleep]?
[bleep].
♪ ♪
Damn.
♪ ♪
I made a mistake, which led to a failure.
Forgot to put that joist, that little pressure joist,
at the top of those leans,
forcing the middle one tighter so it wouldn't fall out.
And it fell out. I bumped it, and it fell out.
I knew it.
I picked it up, and I knew it,
but I was already down to nothing,
so I forced it, and I should've stopped, got dressed.
♪ ♪
It's silly.
♪ ♪
Silly.
I think the biggest fear
we face, usually, is the fear of failure,
and I think that holds a lot of people back.
If you don't accept failure as a part of your journey,
then you'll never find success.
I appreciate the failure
because that's the only lesson you're actually gonna learn,
and I know how to handle failure,
to be optimistic.
Do you give up after your first failure?
I don't. I don't give up at all.
♪ ♪
So I've got some work to do...
Before I do that again.
♪ ♪
‐ I'll be so happy.
I'll stay forever.
Pretty much, if I have a bed and a dry spot,
I'm in general pretty damned happy,
so I'm gonna attempt to make the bed.
We'll start with the frame.
This post is just the right height.
I'm gonna lash this all down
so they don't move around all the time.
♪ ♪
Good.
I have been in the outdoors,
rather immersed in it, from the time I was a child.
I'm originally from Wyoming,
from a tiny town called Lander.
♪ ♪
So I'm sure that you have noticed my accent
is not exactly from Wyoming.
I have lived now in England for 11 years,
long enough to sound funny in both places.
I don't sound American to Americans.
I do not sound British to British people either.
They're not quite sure what I am or where I'm from,
but it's not fooling anyone.
♪ ♪
Everything is golden, and then we cover the bed
in grass and then pine boughs, and then we have a bed.
It's a usable bed at this point.
It just needs the squishy bit put on now.
Yeah.
♪ ♪
I feel‐‐I feel odd.
Actually, it's been a really long time
since I felt this feeling,
but I think I'm potentially
a little bit homesick right now.
♪ ♪
And I'm not 100% sure, for me, what that means.
Like, what home am I longing for?
♪ ♪
I need to, I think, acknowledge the fact that I miss something
from back in my other life,
my life before "Alone."
[laughs]
[humming soft melody]
♪ ♪
♪ I am just ♪
♪ A lonely soul ♪
♪ So where, I ask ♪
♪ Shall I call my ♪
♪ Home? ♪
[chuckles]
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
‐ Good morning.
[yawns]
I had some food dreams last night.
Oh, that's terrible. This early?
Ay.
[scoffs]
I was in a football tournament,
and they had a room...
That everybody could go to and just...
[laughs]
Eat all they wanted.
Aww.
[yawns]
So I'm trying to block it out,
try and get some food of my own out here.
♪ ♪
Mom told me before I left,
the last thing was to look at the moon,
and know I'm looking at the same thing.
We'll be looking at the same time.
♪ ♪
I really want to make my mom and dad proud.
They've always loved and supported me.
They're my biggest fans.
I want to do well for them.
♪ ♪
Oh, yeah.
I've got a lot of faith in this boat.
♪ ♪
This boat is amazing. I love it. It's solid.
The outriggers are working perfect.
I feel like I can go anywhere now,
So I'm gonna go for it.
♪ ♪
Going for a white fish.
♪ ♪
My dad and I used to fish bull trout in Oregon.
Spent a lot of hours trolling with my dad,
days and days of my life.
I'd love to be trolling with him.
I got a hit.
♪ ♪
Fish today, baby. Fish today. Come on, fish. Let's do it.
♪ ♪
Holy [bleep]. I might have done it.
Yes! Yes, yes!
♪ ♪
Dang it! [bleep]! Ah!
Ahh! So close.
♪ ♪
My dad is what got me into this lifestyle.
He introduced me at a young age
to the outdoors,
into hunting, into fishing,
eating wild game, being outdoors, camping.
And I loved it. This is life!
I've been out here for at least three hours.
I've had four bites, no hook‐ups, no fish.
♪ ♪
I connect with my body through this lifestyle.
I connect with my mind and my heart
more than any other living situation
I've ever had in my life.
♪ ♪
It's physically, emotionally, intellectually,
socially more stimulating than the alternative.
♪ ♪
Yes! It came off right in the boat.
Ha, ha!
Hey.
Hey, I'll take it. I'll take it. Yes!
♪ ♪
Oh, thank you, fish.
God, I needed a fish today.
♪ ♪
I needed a fish today.
♪ ♪
I am gonna invest all in right now on fish
because I think that's the best use of my calories.
That's the best use of my time.
I'm gonna go fish.
All right, just need to catch one a day for the next 80 days.
♪ ♪
This boat is not gonna have a single focus.
I am gonna troll out of this boat.
I'm gonna jig out of this boat.
I'm gonna anchor up in this boat.
I'm gonna set fish traps at 20 feet, 30 feet,
50 feet, 100 feet.
I'm gonna spend a lot of time in this boat.
Let's go eat some fish.
♪ ♪
‐ I've heard what a great smoke
this kinnikinnick is.
And I don't smoke,
but I figured I'd give it a shot,
so I'm gonna take this random piece of driftwood,
and I'm just gonna make a pipe
or attempt to make a little pipe out of it,
and I've got two cameras just in case I cut myself.
Double the fun.
♪ ♪
Mentally, the biggest strategy for me
is keep my hands busy,
keep building things, keep working on things,
and that will keep my mind distracted
away from what's going on back home.
♪ ♪
I guess I got to bore down a hole
with which to put tobaccy.
♪ ♪
There's probably better options than to stab
right through my quad.
♪ ♪
I have to not allow myself to think about those things
because if I think about my wife and my son
and make that the pinnacle of why I'm out here
and really push to succeed for them,
then my constant thoughts about them
will make me miss them
and will distract me from surviving.
Not a bad little pipe.
Let's get that kinnikinnick out and pack it up.
I need to be mentally strong
because I have been presented
with a once‐in‐a‐lifetime opportunity.
It's pretty crumbly.
And if I don't win,
I feel like I'd be doing a disservice to my family.
That $1/2 million would allow me
to pay off all of our bills
and have money left over.
♪ ♪
That would allow me to work even less
and spend even more time with my family.
♪ ♪
That's not bad.
Huh!
All right. What's up next?
♪ ♪
[squirrel chittering]
‐ There he is.
[mimicking squirrel chittering]
[squirrel chitters]
We say hello every morning.
So...
If you believe that you can talk to animals,
meaning communicate your thought energy in your sound
or in your voice,
do you think that if you mean no harm,
they can read that?
I'd like to believe so.
I'd like to believe I'm sending good vibes out
to the local wildlife.
Unfortunately, the vibes that I'm sending out to the grouse
and the hare is that I want to eat them,
and therefore, they're like, "I'm gonna avoid that man."
I tried asking the eagle this morning to bring me a fish,
but he didn't turn around.
♪ ♪
I have an idea.
For pier number one,
I chose just to block it like Lincoln Logs
and then put a middle brace between it,
but I realized that was my fail point,
and my initial H is pegged.
It's fantastic, solid,
so I decide to peg my supports into the main.
♪ ♪
We're on mission set right now, which is find food.
So do everything we can to get food,
and that includes beat the elements.
♪ ♪
All right. It's time.
♪ ♪
Beautiful.
♪ ♪
When you're in the wild
and you're in a survival situation,
if you don't have the ability to pivot
when things don't go the way you planned,
then it's gonna be a struggle,
and that's where I think creative problem‐solving
comes into play.
♪ ♪
This is a huge stepping‐stone for me,
to be able to walk out 25 feet
because I know there's gonna be fish.
This is where I start thriving.
♪ ♪
Oh, wow.
Awesome.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
‐ Seaweed.
I'll start small, just eat one.
Hmm.
It's crunchy.
Yeah, it doesn't taste good. Mm‐mm.
It's time to get back to work.
♪ ♪
I'm having zero success fishing.
I need to really finish the fish basket.
Since I can't catch a larger trout,
I can hopefully get some smaller fish with this basket
and maybe cook those up and make a stew out of those.
I'm gonna wrap this with cordage just to make sure
it stays the shape that I want.
A fish basket has two baskets,
a smaller basket inside of a larger basket.
It's a cone shape, and once they swim into it,
they can't figure out how to turn around
and swim back out the same hole
that they came in.
Yeah, I think that's gonna be all right there.
I'm not really that far into it,
and I've already lost quite a bit of weight,
so I have to get some food.
I have to find a better way to get a fish.
This lake is just extremely difficult.
I can't get my line out far enough.
My lures aren't working.
I have to get food soon.
If I don't, I can't keep enough weight on.
There's so much I wanted to do and make while I was here,
but I feel like I'm forced to get things done
so that I can get food.
♪ ♪
I knew coming in here
that I move so fast through life
that my thoughts don't really get to catch up with me.
Ah, it's gonna have to have a rock on it.
♪ ♪
I think that if you want to clear your mind
and sort things out,
the wilderness is definitely the place to do that.
♪ ♪
I need to it to be out there way farther.
♪ ♪
All I keep thinking about is my family.
My children are so worried about me.
It's like they're my parents.
I think because of the things that I went through,
been through a lot of ups and downs
and some very rough situations in my life,
and I think they just don't want to see me get hurt,
but all of those different situations,
I just learned to adapt.
Okay, the fish basket is submerged.
♪ ♪
I'm very resilient.
Nothing is gonna knock me off my path.
I'm just gonna pick myself up, and I'm gonna keep going.
And I always come back even stronger than I was.
[stomach growls]
♪ ♪
‐ That's the benefit to having a mustache like a walrus.
It filters everything out of your water.
All the large stuff.
The only problem is kissing the wife.
Maybe I'll shave my beard off when I go home.
♪ ♪
Let's go see if there's a fish.
Oh, my God. Think I got a fish!
♪ ♪
Look at that.
♪ ♪
Easy, fella.
♪ ♪
That's a rainbow.
♪ ♪
Rainbow trout.
It's promising. That's what that is.
♪ ♪
Cooking up this tiny little guy.
So we're gonna eat every single piece of him,
for sure.
♪ ♪
I'm excited.
♪ ♪
It's not gonna take much to get this guy done.
♪ ♪
Wonderful.
♪ ♪
That was his tail.
♪ ♪
Told you.
Every piece.
♪ ♪
All the way down to the lips.
I know who I am, and I don't have any doubt
about my capability to succeed in a challenge.
Wow.
That was a fast, fast meal.
I'm just an out‐of‐the‐box thinker and problem‐solver.
Perfect.
And I'll figure out a way to succeed,
and I don't have that quit in me when there's a struggle.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[insect buzzes]
‐ Oh, yeah, bug right in the eye,
right when I'm about to talk.
Mm.
While I'm waiting for my boiled water to cool,
I'm gonna put the one final
most important touch on the cabin,
and that is our family initials.
♪ ♪
So I'm gonna put that on the ridge beam,
J, J, O, A.
♪ ♪
We put that on everything.
That's inscribed on our wedding bands.
My wife inscribed it on my ax handle.
♪ ♪
It's on everything.
Now the O is going to be the fun one,
all curve.
♪ ♪
That's better.
♪ ♪
Now the cabin is complete.
Julia, Jordon, Odin, Aura,
the initials of my wife,
myself, my son, and my daughter.
♪ ♪
[sighs]
♪ ♪
I just had a moment
thinking about my daughter,
and it gets easier
as time goes on,
but I still have
waves of grief that come over me.
♪ ♪
Now, I'm a very private person.
I don't have a lot of friends.
I don't talk to a lot of people about personal things,
and very few people
know the details of what I'm about to say.
My daughter was born with a heart defect,
and by the time she was two weeks old,
she had had two open heart surgeries.
When she was six months old,
she had another open heart surgery
that lasted over ten hours,
and every six months after that,
she had catheter procedures
where they would balloon her arteries.
Her long‐term prognosis was good through childhood,
and yet we unexpectedly lost her
before she turned four.
♪ ♪
But the most painful things
to deal with,
the most painful memory
are the echoes
of the good times
that are no longer there.
♪ ♪
It wasn't her passing.
It wasn't the trauma of surgeries.
It was the good times that are no longer there.
♪ ♪
She was the most dynamic,
most vibrant,
most amazing spark of light
that you could imagine.
♪ ♪
That is the most private part,
the most intimate detail of who I am.
♪ ♪
And I'm willing to sit here...
♪ ♪
And tell it to a camera
to be seen by who knows...
♪ ♪
Because that little girl was that magical,
that special
that her tale
should be known throughout the world.
♪ ♪
She was our little wildflower.
♪ ♪
She bloomed so bright.
♪ ♪
So vibrant.
And then spring was gone, and so was she.
I love you, Aura.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
‐ Checked my fish basket out. Nothing in it.
♪ ♪
So I'm just gonna throw it back out there.
Interesting.
Apparently, every day, we're gonna do something
a little different.
There we go.
All right.
♪ ♪
I think fish basket would be more successful in, like,
a pond or, like, my little creeks at home.
This giant lake, I don't know.
But there's one thing that is certain for me,
and that is berries,
and they're gonna be going away.
I can notice every day that they are,
but I really need to make sure
that I'm getting as many of these as I can
because it's really what's keeping me
fed most of the day now.
You can see that they're starting to fall off
onto the ground,
and then some are drying up at the top.
♪ ♪
It's funny how some people need to have other people
in their life or it affects them terribly.
♪ ♪
And other people can exist without it.
♪ ♪
They're starting to turn black.
I think for most of my life I've felt alone
because most of the people in my life
had always left anyways.
Like, my marriage, he was never there.
He was always running off and doing things with his friends
and wanted me to basically take care of everything,
so I did.
That was no fun because I worked all the time.
I had to 'cause he wanted this giant life,
and so I built it.
And when the kids moved out,
he decided he didn't want to be there either.
And make me able to deal with being alone.
♪ ♪
I function okay alone.
Well, I got a half a can, thankfully.
So that's not bad for one little spot.
♪ ♪
That's just what I need to do all the time now, every day.
I need to make sure that I'm doing something
to prepare for the upcoming days.
♪ ♪
‐ I really thought about going for a walk,
but really crazy windy day,
and I don't know what it's gonna bring for weather.
It's hard to tell. Clouds are moving fast,
and the winds are just howling.
Look at these ducks.
These ducks don't care
about a little wind and wave.
They're headed somewhere, and you know their feet
are going a million miles an hour right now.
Just chugging along, but they've got each other.
♪ ♪
When I began this journey, I was determined to win
or at least go as far
as I possibly could before my body gave out.
I came here because this is the ultimate challenge.
It's the ultimate test of a survivalist.
It's the ultimate test of willpower.
It's the ultimate test of your mind,
your body, and your spiritual connection.
♪ ♪
And I knew that the only way to succeed
was to forget about home, to forget about my wife,
my son, and to forget about my daughter
and to immerse myself into this life.
♪ ♪
And I've found that I can't do that.
♪ ♪
They are woven into the fabric of my heart and my soul.
♪ ♪
I find myself
continually thinking of my daughter,
and I realize that I'm actually going through
the same grieving process that I am at home.
But the difference is, at home
I can look into the eyes of my wife,
I can look into the eyes of my son,
and I see a part of her there, and that soothes me,
and that comforts me.
And I don't have that here.
♪ ♪
[beeping]
♪ ♪
This is Jordon. I am officially tapping out.
♪ ♪
I'm ready to head back and be with my family.
It is a very, very difficult decision.
You know, if I was here, and it was cold,
and my shelter burned down,
or there was a medical emergency,
or I was starving,
everyone would understand and say,
"Hey, he's got to go,"
but I'm okay with saying,
"This is who I am, and this is my time to leave,"
and to leave for my family and to leave for myself.
♪ ♪
I am naturally such a competitive person.
I figured that I would have to be dragged from the show.
I never thought that my boundary
was gonna come in an emotional form,
but one of my biggest takeaways from this
is that I'm not missing out.
There are parts of me
that sometimes longs for the adventures
as a younger man,
but then I come out here,
and I realize very quickly
I don't get the same thrill
out of experiencing these things by myself.
The real excitement comes from sharing
those moments with my family.
All this time seeking to be alone,
and yet maybe I don't want to be alone.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
‐ Jordon, thank you for sharing your story with us today.
You have dealt with tragedy,
and yet you are the happiest person,
and I think that happiness has got to do
with this authentic connection with your family.
‐ My wife and son are everything to me,
and so possibly winning $1/2 million,
all I could think about was paying off our house
and any bills and basically allowing me
to work less to spend time with my family.
‐ I know, for a lot of people on the show,
one of the hardest things is,
you know, being alone, but it's more than that.
It's being alone with your thoughts.
‐ I spent a lot of time in my life alone
and doing adventures alone,
and I thought that I was really gonna be rekindling
some of that adventurous spirit coming out here,
and going into this, my strategy
was really to focus on myself and my survival tasks at hand
and not even allow myself to think about my family.
‐ Things like fishing, just standing there
for hours and hours, I mean, it's hard in those moments
to keep your mind busy.
‐ Yeah, and I think that's when it hit me the hardest.
It's different when you're talking about grieving
because it's a lot harder to control
when those moments hit you.
Once you start doing things
like picking berries or fishing,
your hands may be busy, but your mind is idle
and free to wander to those darker places,
and I came to the realization that I actually needed
my wife and my son.
They're part of my coping mechanism
of dealing with grief.
Being out there and trying to process it alone
was so much more difficult than I ever imagined.
The joy of being out here, of being outdoors,
of making things and troubleshooting
and all that kind of stuff,
that joy is fading.
‐ You compared your time on "Alone" to gambling.
‐ Yeah, it really felt like a gamble in a way
because you don't know how the fishing is going to be.
You don't know how the game hunting is going to be.
Maybe bring my bow just in case I scare up any grouse.
You also don't know how your competitors are doing.
You're thinking everyone else has a better fishing hole
or better hunting grounds.
‐ I mean, that was a struggle for you, right?
‐ It absolutely was, you know?
Here I am on Choko Lake thinking
that the fishing is easy, and that wasn't the case.
‐ You spent a ton of time on that log, your fishing pier,
and tell us about that incredible moment
when you hooked that trout and dragged it to shore.
‐ I was in utter disbelief when I hooked that fish.
[laughing] Yeah!
And I was in such shock, and to finally get that fish
made me feel like I did something
that is actually contributing to survival,
and I could not wait to eat it.
‐ Oh, yeah, your joy at the end of that was just great.
I totally knew how that fell. Just, like, so exciting.
‐ Whoo! ‐ Tell me about the importance
of those small victories for you.
‐ Those small victories were everything.
Look what I found.
So just finding a couple of gooseberries
underneath the leaves or finding
the perfect alder branch to make the door handle,
any little win felt like
it was just another check mark of,
hey, I'm making it.
I'm getting there. ‐ Yeah.
‐ The remains of the flowers
look like little suns,
and that is enough to make me smile this morning.
‐ Now, let's talk about your permanent shelter.
‐ I had a strong plan going in to make a solid shelter
and feel like I actually have a home.
‐ Feels good to be in there
when other things could be going wrong.
‐ Yeah, it's kind of like when you come home from work,
and you put down your wallet
and your keys in that one spot.
I wanted to be able to walk into my shelter and feel like
I had a place for everything and everything in its place.
Spot for my hat at night.
That's something that kept me mentally healthy
during that time.
‐ Yeah, totally.
I always have to have a shelf of treasures and whatever.
It doesn't even matter if it's, like, a pile of leaves.
I have to have, like, my‐‐
to feel that kind of sense of, you're at home,
and it feels good to be in there
when other things could be going wrong.
‐ Exactly. [both laugh]
‐ Jordon, your story is inspiring.
Thank you for setting
such a beautiful example for us to follow.
‐ Thank you. I'm very, very lucky.
♪ ♪
‐ Holy [bleep]. Those are bears.
Hey! [air horn blares]
‐ I need to get some food. Definitely seeing some grouse.
‐ Oh, [bleep]. Hornets. Ah, [bleep].
‐ Some fresh deer sign.
That gives me a little bit of confidence
that we're gonna have some deer here.
♪ ♪