alone tv show, what 10 Items ?

Take a Cold Steel shovel, modified to have 8" of saw edge. Take a Crunch multitool, modified to have a carbon steel regular knife blade, another file blade in place of the phillips, convert the small flathead into an awl, the medium one into a hook/scoop knife, and one of the flatheads at the end of the file into a chisel. Take a 2 person cotton rope hammock, so you can unravel it and weave lots of netting out it. Take as warm a synthetic sleeping bag as you can get. Take a 5 qt skillet and lid (amazon) Take one of Chief Aj's slingbows, with 6 of the 9 allotted arrows featuring 4-tined fishing heads, which can swiftly become 2 fishhooks per tine. Take the fishing kit, as 4 BIG treblehooks to be set for wolves and big cats, 4 small treblehooks, to be set for coons, possums, skunks, big birds, Take the 3 lb block of salt, if you're not on a seashore. If you ARE on a seacoast, instead take a clear plastic tarp, preferably made out of PEVA clear shower curtain,take the big roll of duct tape, and the snare wire.

each of the food items would be one item, so you've got 2 too many and you only get to take 2 food items, not 3. you get only a short shovel, so the hatchet is wasted. You're going in the fall, so you'd best take a sleeping bag. Everyone has starved because they didn't make netting, Vancouver averages 12" of rain per month, more in the fall, so it's going to be slimy. getting a far started and keeping it going is going to be a real challenge if you're sent there. They give you a 20x20 tarp and a 10x10 tarp, but the 12x12 tarp is an option. I'd take one if I was on a seacoast, but i'd trade it for the 3 lb block of salt if not on the seashore.

If you take the 2 person cotton rope hammock, you can use it to sleep in for a week or so, while you cut/tear half of the 20x20 tarp into 1/8" strips, twist them and weave 500 sq ft of 2" mesh netting out of them. That rope can replace your paracord.

The max it's ever lasted has been 87 days and the producers have taken steps to see to it that such never occurs again. So the floss is wasted. Having won a clear 1/4 mill $, you can afford to have some cavities fixed. Get your teeth all tuned up before you go. you can use charcoal to brush your teeth. Dont waste a pick on the floss.

the hammock, once it's unraveled and the smallest strands are extracted from it, will make over 1000 sq ft of 2" mesh netting. If that's used correctly, along with the mesh made out of the tarp, you'll have 60x 5 ft of seine, and a couple of baited net-weirs. With the seine to push fish towards the "wings" of the weirs, you can average catching 20+ lbs of fish per day, which is what's desperately needed. Only about half of a fish or animal's live weight is edible flesh. fish offers only 650 calories per lb, ready to eat.


Out in the cold, wet, windy conditions, you can easily need to eat 4000 calories per day, as a big guy, so you'll need to eat 6 lbs of fish per day, or 5 lbs of fish and 1 lb of boiled, then fried dandelion roots and/or cambium (in the fish oil) So you'll have another 5 lbs or so of fish flesh to preserve, per day. By the time you've been there 6 weeks, fishing season will be over with, and it will take 2 weeks to have made all the netting and done all the other things you'll need to do. So, say you've caught 600 lbs of fish, eaten 200 lbs of it, and preserved 100 lbs of it. Once you 'hole up" for the winter, staying in your sleeping bag, you may well only need to eat 3 lbs of fish and a bit of cambium per day, and still maintain your bodyweight. So your 100 lbs of preserved fish (it will be at most 50 lbs, dried) will last at most another month, for a total of 2.5 months. Then you can last another 2-4 weeks, depending upon your body fat. If your treblehhooks and wire have snared you a wolf and/or a deer, you might be good for another 2 weeks, too. If your netting wrapped sapling framed "boxtraps" and treblehooks have caught a lot of waterfowl, coons, possums,etc, you might get good for another 2-4 weeks, too. So you CAN be set up to last 4-6 months, if you know what to take and do. That's over double the performance of 90% of the past entrants.

Do you know how to make a "one way" device to lock the snare wire after it's been pulled tight? If not, you wont be catching much of anything in your snares.

you only get to take 2 lbs of each of your food items. That' not enough food value for more than 5 days, so it's not worth using up picks for, other than the 3 lb block of salt (if you're not on a sea coast). Salt is a great bait when you're far from the sea, and it's needed to help preserve meat or fish if the weather's not consistently sub-freezing temps. Near the sea, you can simple stone boil huge amounts of seawater and extract salt in that manner. Dig a hole, 2x2 and 1 ft deep. Line it with a tarp. line the tarp with sand/small gravel to protect it from the hot stones. When you've get a very salty brine filter it thru your T shirt, and use the 5 qt skillet (with lid) to do the final boil-off and have salt. Use your gaiters and the duct tape to make a dry bag, for keeping-dry your salt.

Chunks of tarp and the tape suffice to make other dry bags, for keeping dry your spindle. If you use iodine, before you leave, to heavily rust the outside of your shovel, it's easy to fire-roll a chunk of T shirt and get fire in that way. Once you have ashes, dried tinder and charred punk wood, or charred pithy reeds, it's easy to get fire with any hard, sharp rock and any carbon steel tool.

oh yes, I've applied for every season since the first one, but they'll never pick somebody who will make it last 5-6 months. They want their expenses to end as soon as they have enough video to make 12 shows. 6 of my 9 arrows would feature 4-tined fishing heads. One of those 6 would have slip on rubber fletching, and be used for bowfishing. 3 arrows would feature regular feathers and 2 bladed broadheads, 5 of the 6 fishing arrows would feature spiral flu flu fletching, cause the drag from such fletching causes the arrow to fall to earth after traveling 20m or so. this greatly reduces the risk of loss or damage to the arrow. with the tines removed, it's still an effective blunt for use on big birds and small game. Each tine, courtesy of the multitool, can become 2 fishhooks in a few minutes. The snarewire can convert the 40 single hooks into 13 treble hooks Use most of them for waterfowl, raptors, crows/magepies and small game. Make little net/tarp bags for bait for the hooks set in water. Then the bait wont just dissolve or be nibbled away by minnows.

use seasoned, springy forked sticks to set the hooks. This trick, the bags, the treblhooks and setting them for game and birds make you MUCH more likely to feed yourself than the 25 single hooks that you're allowed to take. If you take treblehooks, you only get to take 8, so take half of them as BIG treblehooks, for catching wolves and big cats. Wire the hooks to small drag logs and bait with salted fishheads, hung about 4 ft in the air, to encourage gulping. Horrific, but how often do you get to clear 1/4 mill $ in 90 days.?

if you win with ABILITY, instead of just being fat and lucky, you'll clear twice as much money, cause everyone will want to train with you, read your books, watch your vids. Nobody gives a damn about what some fatty has to say about starving more slowly than skinny people.

If you know how to reliably get maximum return on your investments, 100k will retire you quite nicely in the third world, and 1/4 mil will do so here in the US. 300k properly invested, can net you 100k a year, letting you have 100k to live upon while your investments get going that first year, and keeping 100k in bullion gold coins, in case things get really screwed-up.

How close are you to LC? Asking in case SHTF. I’ve got solar and battery power camping, yaks and guns. You feed us and I’ll take care of shelter and cooking.

the sleeping bag inclusion was only for season 4, when there were 2 partners per team and they were started 10 miles apart. It took all of them at least 8 days to find each other. So each had to have a sleeping bag, knife and fire starter. That's not true anymore. The knife, ferro rod and sleeping bag most certainly ARE picks these days, and were also for the fist 3 seasons. Sorry for the misleading season of gear lists. they never published a list for season 5. and seasons 1-3, the gillnet was twice as big, 2" mesh instead of 1.4" mesh and the rations were 5 lbs each, not 2 lbs. The producers continually make it harder, if the show lasts more than 60 days.

Monofilament fishing line is much stronger than floss. you're going to need a LOT more salt than 1/3rd lb, in order to be able to preserve enough fish to do you any good. fishing season there ends in a month or so, all the fish flee the rivers, back into the lakes, cause the rivers all freeze solid. Since they drop you off in mid summer in Mongolia, it's warm weather for the first month. Gotta have lots of salt, and it's useful bait when far from a seashore. The E tool can chop like a house afire, so the hatchet is a wasted pick.

lentils have only half the calories of pemmican. 2 lbs is not enough food to make any difference. Far better to take something that can provide a lot more food than that, like the 2 person cotton rope hammock.

there's never been any restriction on the hammock type. Everyone's just been too dumb to take one that can be used to easily make a lot of netting. If you use the netting intelligently, it's the winning element. You make a pair of baited net-weirs and a seine that you use to push fish towards your weirs. Put yourself into ketosis well before you go and you'll experience no hunger for several days, and very little diminishment of your abilities. The rations are not worth taking. With all the treblehooks, well used you'll have fish, the first full day, You can have the 5x60 ft seine made by the end of the second day, and that will generate some fish. In fact, half that much can be used as a cast net, if you're got clear, shallow water and visible fish.

it's much faster and easier and a lot better odds of success to hang the baited treblehhooks for birds and animals than waiting for something to be stupid enough to walk into a snare. Do you know how to catch deer with a horizontal loop, held 6 ft in the air? :-) Having trapped with steel traps and proper cable snares is not the same thing as having to use the crap snarewire that you're limited to on this show.

You've made a reasonable set of assumptions for this list, given that I gave you the incorrect gear list, for season 4. But you'll find that you can do far better, with more thought. Shallow streams, ponds, near shore in lakes, or the ocean, that's where you have to function, even after you make the pontoon outrigger raft. It's just too damned dangerous to be out where it's deep, when you need every last piece of gear and when the water is snow-melt. you might make it to shore if you capsize, but then you freeze, or have to tap out cause you've lost vital gear. When you're out on the raft, best be barefoot, have minimal clothing, and have everything attached to the raft, including yourself.

A pontoon outrigger raft means that you dont capsize, can's ship water, and it doesn't matter if your local wood floats well or not. Before you leave, waterproof spray the inside of the backpack and one of your 2 sets of outer clothing. Then they can be stuffed with dry debris, sewn together with a straightened out fishhook with the seam taped. make a dry bag for the camera gear and similarly use the camera case as a pontoon. The life preserver, the airhorn, the bear spray, all float. The inside 2 logs, to which all the pontoons are attached, can be rigged to be separated from the rest of the raft, if you're on a violent sea coast. Then you can take the vital part of it way up from the high tide line and secure it. The other parts of the raft are replaceable.

you're not allowed to cut up the 10x10 "camera" tarp, but it can be used to make a shelter. YOu do have to keep at least a small hunk of tarp for sheltering the camera gear, cause you are required to video EVERYTHING that you do. I'd only take the third tarp if I was on a sea coast, where i didn't need to take the 3 lb block of salt. The clear PEVA tarp is ideal for making a Korchanski super shelter. There are very few places on earth where they can set up this challenge, for 10 people, with adequate distance between them, fresh water sources, etc. They've used Vancouver Island 3 of 5 seasons. VI is so slimy and wet that a dugout shelter is not feasible, but it's the best choice for patagonia and Mongolia.

the fishing kit is 25 single hooks and 900 ft of monofilament line. a treblehook is counted as 3 of your hooks. So the floss is a wasted pick. You've got PLENTY of fishing line. By taking the 6 fishing arrows, 4 tines each, and converting 5 of them into blunts, you can make 40 fishhooks. Treble hooks are much more likely to catch fish, game, or birds than single hooks. The springy forked sticks are a major aid to makiing catches, and so are the little net/tarp bait bags. By taking the slingbow, you have something to finish off animals that you've caught in the snares or treblehooked to drag logs. A 100 lb wolf or deer is a lot of meat, guys. That beats the hell out of catching a dozen rabbits.

often, there's no trees adequately springy/strong, tall enough to adequately hold a deer, and in any case, the neck snare will require braiding that lw snare wire to hold them. The treblehooks and drag logs dont require as much of your precious wire. If you also have foot snare loops, up on 2" high forked stakes, wired to the drag log, you'll increase your chances of having the critter not go far, of course. Your weirs will attract lots of predators and so will your stored food. So you need to have something there for them, so that when they come to steal from you, they end up feeding you instead.

you're going to use the jacket of the rainsuit to hold and carry water, and the pants of the rainsuit are going to be one of your raft's pontoons. So half of the 20x20 tarp has to be cut up and made into a poncho and chaps,and other things, like storage bags for dried fish, water filter, etc. That is how you can stay reasonably dry. VI in particular, gets an average of 12" of rain per month. It's never dry there.

You have to make a seep well, with sides built up to keep out critters and a tarp cover so that you dont get bird poop in it. Also, a chunk of tarp has to be rolled up and sewn-taped, and stuffed with layers of moss, gravel, sand, and charcoal, with a bit of your T shirt preventing the char from falling into your water. by using the seep well and this filter, you are freed up from having to boil 2 gallons of water every day. Having to have a fire all the time SUCKS, folks. You want to only have a hot meal once per day, right before you sleep.

to maximize the fish catch, use the shoreline as one of the "wings" of your net-weir. That way, you can have a 10 ft diameter purse of the weir, and almost 100 ft of wing, streching out into the water at an angle, forming a v with the shoreline, you see. Then you use the seine to force the fish into the purse of the weir, and have a wicker/net gate with which to close the entrance
of the weir. you can then either fold up your seine for emptying the weir, or have a smaller seine for the job, or a dipnet, fish-spear, etc. On VI, you'd be well advised to make a heavy duty harpoon, cause a seal is a lot of very badly needed fat and meat.

freshwater fish with the exception of salmon during a "run" have almost no fat. If you boil the fish and keep using the same water, you'll eventually have a shallow film of oil floating atop the water, which can then be scraped/poure off and the water either boiled off or evaporated, leaving the fat. or you can very carefully fry the fish, in a bit of water, and collect the fat from your skillet, bit by bit. That fat is very much needed, to help you choke down the cambium and dandelion roots. You boil them first, to make them somewhat chewable, and then fry them in the fish oil. This makes them more palatable and much easier to digest.

often, the water's too deep for rock weirs, or you aint got enough rocks, close enough, it's a ton of work to make a rock weir and you aint got the calories needed for such a job , and such a weir wont catch really small fish. Netting can be used to catch crabs, crayfish, birds, small mammals. Rocks cannot. netting is portable. you can be doing all that work and have no real catch, with the rock idea. The net weir, you just move it to a better spot. Since you cut up the half of the 20x20 tarp first, the hammock can be used for sleeping the first week or so, saving the need to make a raised wooden bed for later, when you've got fish-income calories to help you do so. Parts of the cotton rope hammock can make much needed heavy duty cordage, for the anchor rock for the raft, to anchor each end of a net, etc. The restriction of the fishine to non-braided monofilament definitely restricts what it will hold, unless you braid 3-4 lengths of it, which is a pita.

Netting can be made by firelight,while in the shelter, at least mostly inside of your sleeping bag,conserving precious calories and daylight. You can be high and dry as you make netting, but not while you try to make a stone weir. :-)

Imma need a magnesium fire starter. I failed that part of boy scouts

You sound like you know what you're talking about living in the wilderness...

But what the hell are you investing 300k in to make 30% return year over year?

It Ain't happening. And I couldnt retire on $1m at my age, much less 300k