The Best Alone Seasons: Every Season Ranked From Good to Untouchable

Ranking the best seasons of Alone is subjective, but it doesn't have to be lazy. I'm scoring the twelve completed US seasons on three things: how far the survival bar got pushed (winner days plus the field's average), how close the finish was, and whether the season delivered a moment or setting that changed how the show is remembered. Season 13 is still airing, so it sits out. Here's the full field first, then the tiers.

The best Alone seasons, ranked

Rank	Season	Location	Winner	Winner days	Field avg
1	S6 Arctic	Great Slave Lake, NWT	Jordan Jonas	77	45.4
2	S3 Patagonia	Patagonia, Argentina	Zachary Fowler	87	54.3
3	S7 Million Dollar	Great Slave Lake, NWT	Roland Welker	100	49.9
4	S11 Arctic Circle	Mackenzie Delta, NWT	William Larkham Jr.	84	37.3
5	S9 Labrador	Northern Labrador	Juan Pablo Quiñonez	78	46.1
6	S8 Grizzly Mountain	Chilko Lake, BC	Clay Hayes	74	41.2
7	S5 Redemption	Selenge, Mongolia	Sam Larson	60	30.1
8	S1	Vancouver Island, BC	Alan Kay	56	23.7
9	S10 Saskatchewan	Reindeer Lake, SK	Alan Tenta	66	37.0
10	S4 Lost & Found	Vancouver Island, BC	Jim & Ted Baird	75	39.3
11	S2	Vancouver Island, BC	David McIntyre	66	33.8
12	S12 Africa	Great Karoo, South Africa	Nathan Olsen	34	16.0

The field average column is the mean days lasted across each season's cast (season 1's average covers the nine contestants with recorded day counts). It's the single best proxy for how deep a season ran: a high winner number with a low field average usually means one dominant player and a lot of early television, while a high average means the whole cast pushed the game somewhere.

The untouchable tier

Season 6 is the one everything else is measured against. Around day 20, Jordan Jonas killed a bull moose, the first big-game kill in franchise history, and turned a starvation contest into a stocked-larder win at 77 days. He added a wolverine and steady fishing on top, and the field around him averaged 45.4 days, one of the deepest casts the show has ever run. It has the signature moment and the survival depth at once, so it takes the top spot.

Season 3 is right behind it on the numbers alone, and by field average (54.3 days) it's actually the deepest season ever aired. Zachary Fowler's 87 days is the longest winning run under standard rules, and he won when runner-up Carleigh Fairchild was medically evacuated on day 86 with her BMI just under the show's mandatory threshold, an 87-to-86 finish that is still the tightest the US show has produced. Patagonia also gave the franchise its first non-Canadian setting and took away the coastal foraging safety net every Vancouver Island cast had leaned on.

The high tier

Season 7 belongs here for the milestone: the format switched to a fixed 100-day threshold for a $1,000,000 prize, and Roland Welker was the only contestant to reach it, emerging in late December after an actual Arctic winter. It's the one time the show changed its own rules and the number still landed. What keeps it out of the top two is the margin: runner-up Callie Russell was evacuated 11 days short, so the ending was never in doubt the way seasons 3 or 11 were.

Season 11 pushed 84 winning days above the Arctic Circle and produced its own one-day margin (84 to 83, with third place at 80, three people all past the point where most seasons have already ended). Season 9 in Labrador ran a 78-day winner three days clear of Karie Lee Knoke, both of them starving through the finish.

The solid middle and the floor

Seasons 8, 5, 1, and 10 are all good television without a defining hook. Season 8 had another one-day finish (74 to 73) and Clay Hayes hunting a deer with a bow he built himself; Season 5 was Sam Larson's redemption win after placing second in Season 1; Season 1 is where the whole format's DNA was set, even if the field averaged just 23.7 days because half the cast left inside the first week; Season 10's Alan Tenta won a cold, workmanlike season at 66 days.

The team format of Season 4 and the early-installment roughness of Season 2 land lower. Season 4's pairs finished one day apart, which should rank it higher, but the format diluted the isolation that makes the show what it is. Season 2 refined the casting and pacing that season 1 invented, and David McIntyre's methodical 66-day win aged well, it just doesn't own a moment the way the top half does.

Season 12 in the Great Karoo sits at the bottom, and the data explains why: the field averaged just 16 days and Nathan Olsen won at 34, the lowest winning total of any completed season. A semi-arid desert punished the usual water-and-forage playbook, and the whole cast collapsed fast. It's a fascinating outlier, just not a deep watch. Our location brutality ranking covers why the Karoo broke people faster than the Arctic ever has.

What about the Alone Australia seasons?

If you fold the Australian show into the conversation about the best Alone seasons, its third season makes the strongest case: Shay Williamson's 76-day win in Tasmania's West Coast Range is the longest run in that show's history, and the finish (76 to 73, ending on a medical evacuation) was genuinely tense. Season 1's Gina Chick story and season 2's Fiordland setting are both worth your time too; the full breakdown is in our Alone Australia winners list.

Which Alone season should you watch first?

Not necessarily the best one. Season 6 assumes you already care about the day counts; if you're brand new, season 3 or season 8 teaches the format faster because the field stays big deeper into the run. I keep a separate path through the catalog in the best Alone seasons for first-time viewers, and for the raw numbers behind these placements, the records of Alone and the winners hub have the full breakdown.