Well, that escalated quickly.
Alone Africa isn’t even a week old, yet the survivalist are dropping like flies. During the third episode, titled “Thirst Trap,” two more contestants quit, bringing the total to four tap outs after just five days in the wilderness.
The high attrition rate has me wondering if the dry and rocky landscape in South Africa’s Great Karoo desert is, indeed, the toughest location in the show’s history.
It’s a Thirsty Crew
(Spoilers ahead!) I’ll get to the tap outs later, but to me, the biggest revelation of episode 3 was that the fight against thirst would become the season’s defining struggle after all.
Yes, the show’s pre-season marketing material hyped-up the hardship created by the quest for water. I admittedly shrugged it off as hyperbole while watching the opening episode, when it became clear that all ten participants were stationed on the banks of a massive lake.
But as we saw in episode 3, access to water in the desert doesn’t diminish thirst—or shrink the massive workload required to keep thirst at bay.
In this episode we got a sense of the grueling daily regimen survivalists must maintain in order to stay hydrated. Get water. Filter out the gunk. Build a fire. Boil the water in a pot that holds two quarts. Let it cool off. Drink. Repeat.
Yeah, it’s a full-time job.
And the ramifications of this process are massive. Participants must keep fire going. They can’t take on too many mid-day tasks—like building a shelter or fishing—that steal their attention from the water-purification process.
And, perhaps most importantly, they cannot stray too far from camp, for fear of wilting in the heat and losing access to their stores of purified water.
In a speedy flash of Alone text, we learned that just four participants chose to bring a canteen into the Great Karoo: Douglas, Doug, Nathan, and Jit. Everyone else has to stay close to home. When I learned this information, I made a mental note—will a canteen separate the winner from everyone else?
In episode 3 we saw two survivalists address the so-called “thirst trap” head on. Kelsey created a water storage cistern made out of a strip of tarp and rocks.
Douglas, meanwhile, scored mega bushcraft points for building his own water storage unit out of a massive agave root. I don’t know if Douglas has what it takes to win this season, but his quick thinking vaulted him way up in my own mental ranking of the survivalists.
Did They Have the Right Stuff?
I thought a lot about Douglas and Kelsey while watching Pablo, 55, struggle under the unrelenting sun and eventually call for rescue. Pablo’s demise showcased the serious toll of the water workload.
I will likely never personally experience the discomfort and struggle that any Alone participant endures in the wild—thank god. But armchair quarterbacking their decisions is, of course, a crucial component of Alone fandom.
While seated in my armchair of omniscience, I couldn’t help but wonder why Pablo didn’t try to construct some type of water-storage system of his own. I also wondered if he could have lasted longer by choosing a canteen instead of a shovel and a saw.
That said, I passed little judgement when I watched Will, 31, become the season’s fourth resignation in dramatic fashion. After eating a stew made from acacia nuts and prickly pear cactus, Will suffered terrible gastrointestinal stress, eventually vomiting blood. I squirmed in my seat as I watched Will writhe in pain. He called for an emergency rescue—something you rarely see in Alone.
My only takeaway from Will’s departure is that we’ve now seen two people quit (Jit left in episode 1 with a bad stomach) after eating prickly pear, which may be the proverbial poisoned apple of this season.
Is This the Hardest Setting in Alone History?
You have to go way back in Alone’s history to find an attrition rate this high in the opening week. In 2015, during the show’s debut season, four participants gave up in the first four days. A fifth quit on day five.
That year producers staged the show on a remote and soggy corner of Vancouver Island, where water, food, and shelter were in abundance. Three guys bailed due to fear of bears and wolves. A fourth departed after catching a water-borne illness.
Since then, no other season has seen four tap-outs within a week.
So, is Alone Africa really the hardest season so far? I’m leaning toward yes, and to understand why, I think it’s worth examining season 12 through the lens of the show’s history.
A few years ago I asked its executive producer, Ryan Pender, about the early dropouts in season 1. It turns out the flurry of tap outs sounded alarm bells within the show’s production circles.
“We were concerned,” he told me. “Because of course it’s a massive undertaking, lots of money was spent on the season, and the concept was not proven.”
Pender attributed the high attrition rate in season 1 to the casting choices. Back then, Alone was still untested and unknown. To find the ten participants that year, casting directors sought out people they met at survival trade shows or saw online.
“Not everybody knew what they were in store for, and that’s what it really came down to,” Pender said. So, long story short, the survivalists that year were green.
But fast forward to 2025. Alone now attracts millions of viewers each year and has spawned its own culture of bushcraft fanatics. These days, Alone receives 70,000 applications each year, and its casting department follows a multi-step process to find the ten best. By and large, the contestants coming on the show these days know exactly what they’re getting into, and they spend months preparing.
“The participants’ skills are always improving from year to year,” Dave Holder, the show’s safety expert, recently told me. “I love to see how people are practicing these skills in their daily lives. The overall level has gone way up.”
But the x-factor is that all of Alone‘s previous seasons have been set in cool, damp, and in some cases frozen environments. Dehydration isn’t much of a hurdle in coastal Labrador, the Great Slave Lake, or Vancouver Island. And Holder told me that the curveball created by Alone‘s African setting absolutely caught some people off-guard.
I spoke to Holder prior to Alone Africa airing, and while he didn’t divulge any spoilers, he did share a takeaway from what he witnessed during the filming.
“It’s about the stress caused by dehydration. Their skills need to be at a high level so that they can constantly purify water and hydrate,” he said. “This takes up a great deal of the day. You have to remember to drink. You will see people get so engrossed in other tasks that they forget to drink. And for them, the dehydration just gets worse day after day.”
There are no grizzly bears, or wolf packs, or arctic winds in South Africa’s Great Karoo. But its silent killer—dehydration—is enough to convince me that it is the toughest season yet.
