On the fifth day, a dead seal washes up on the beach in front of where we’ve pitched our tent. We’re on a remote and beautiful stretch of coast called Nissen Bight, at the extreme northwest tip of Vancouver Island, surrounded by roadless wilderness where no one lives and few people visit. It’s so wild that three of the first four seasons of the History Channel’s survival show Alone were filmed near here. In fact, that’s part of the reason we came. We’re big fans of the show and love imagining how we would fare.
The hike so far has been brutally hard. Along with my wife, Lauren, and our kids, Ella and Natalie, I’m following the North Coast Trail, a roughly 37-mile path along the top of the island. It’s the newer and lesser-known partner of the West Coast Trail, Canada’s most famous backpacking route, which is more easily accessible, more carefully maintained, and so popular that access is carefully rationed with advance bookings. About 7,500 people hike the West Coast Trail each year, which is roughly how many people have ever completed the North Coast Trail since opened in 2008. A grizzled hiker we met a few days earlier tells us that the northern trail reminds him of how the West Coast Trail was when he first hiked it in 1975.
In Alone: Frozen, a 2022 spin-off season set in Labrador, one of the contestants finds a big chunk of seal skin washed up on the beach. “I mean, it smells fresh,” she says. “Seal fat soup, that’s what’s for dinner tonight.” This scene is on all of our minds as we contemplate the dead seal on Nissen Bight. My main worry is that the carcass will attract wolves or cougars or bears if it stays there overnight. But I also have a moment of perfect clarity and self-knowledge: out here in the wilderness, hundreds of miles from the nearest store, where nature is still red in tooth and claw, there’s still no way in hell I’d eat that seal.
Here are five other insights I took away from the trip, which I’ll try to keep in mind as I await details on Season 13.
1. The Terrain Is Insane
How hard, you ask, could a 37-mile hike be? We gave ourselves six days to cover the distance, which meant that we averaged around five miles in eight hours on each of the first five days, then put in a big final day when the terrain got easier. It alternates between steep, muddy rainforest and rocky beaches and headlands. The mud can be thigh-deep or worse; the scrambles up and over vertical headlands, sometimes assisted by a greasy rope, are exhausting and sometimes terrifying. And this is on the trail!
In Season 4 of Alone, pairs of participants were dropped roughly ten miles apart and had to reunite by bushwacking through the forest. It took eight days for the first pair to reconnect, which struck me at the time as ridiculous. After hiking in the area, I’m now flabbergasted that they managed to get anywhere at all. Never was this more clear than when we received satellite warning of a potential tsunami one evening and had to contemplate fleeing from the coast. The obvious response would have been to hike inland and uphill through the woods—but without a trail to follow, that option seemed all but physically impossible.
2. The Wildlife Is Wild
I’ll admit that I’ve snickered when Alone contestants tap out after hearing or seeing a bear. In Season 1, someone taps out after the first night because a bear was sniffing around his camp. The bears on Vancouver Island are almost exclusively black bears rather than grizzlies, so the danger doesn’t seem extreme to me. Still, I realize things can hit differently when you’re truly in the wild rather than, say, in a national park with help nearby.
It’s not just bears. The northern part of Vancouver Island reportedly has the highest concentration of cougars on the planet, along with hundreds of wolves. We didn’t see any cougars—although that doesn’t mean they didn’t see us—but we saw plenty of wolf tracks, including fresh ones one morning showing that they had passed right through our camp overnight.
And sure enough, a bear strolled out of the woods one evening a few hundred yards from our tent and wandered down to the shore. We unsheathed our cans of bear spray and settled in to watch. It looked like the bear was munching on the thick bed of half-dried seaweed just above the waterline (probably, it turns out, foraging for tiny crustaceans hidden within). We watched for half an hour, and eventually tired of the show, but the bear foraged on. We headed off to cook and eat dinner, then got in the tent and zipped into our sleeping bags while the bear kept munching. It was gone by morning.
3. The Ocean (in Theory) Provides
The jumping-off point for our hike (and for the initial seasons of Alone) was a town called Port Hardy, a six-hour drive north from Victoria, where the island’s main airport is located. From there, it’s an hour-long water taxi ride along the coast to the start of the North Coast Trail. During the ride, we saw humpback whales, orcas, seals, sea otters, and waves of the pink salmon that were running during our visit in early August. During the hike, too, we got used to watching seals and sea otters (and often, we eventually realized, pieces of driftwood) playing in the waves just offshore.
We spent our second night on a beach at Cape Sutil, where there’s also a nearby yurt where park rangers sometimes camp during the hiking season. There were three rangers there that evening, and one of them wandered down to the beach with his fishing rod and pulled out a giant pink salmon on one of his first casts. We tried to look hungry, but it turned out that the rangers had a propane freezer to store whatever they didn’t eat for dinner.
It was one of those moments that lures you into thinking that it wouldn’t be so hard to feed yourself out there. But the ranger had high-quality fishing gear, as opposed to the jury-rigged rods and line Alone contestants have to rely on. He and his two colleagues then spent another hour or so fishing up and down the beach with no further luck other than a couple of small ones they threw back. As much as I like to imagine feasting on salmon, a more realistic fantasy is probably the disgusting worm-like gunnels that Ted and Jim Baird harvest from under rocks in the intertidal zone in Season 4. “If you haven’t realized,” Ted says at one point, “it’s foraging that wins this show.”
4. Things Can Go Wrong
On our second-last day of hiking, we caught up with a woman hobbling along the trail using her hiking poles as crutches. She had slipped and wrenched her knee badly, but there were no easy extraction points nearby, so she was trying to hike another ten miles out while her uncle carried her pack along with his own. I offered to haul her pack another mile up the trail, but there wasn’t much else we could do.
The various seasons of Alone are rife with accidents of varying types and levels of severity: falls, burns, blade wounds, poisonings, and so on. This is a risk in any backcountry endeavor, of course. But the slippery, jagged terrain on Vancouver Island felt unusually treacherous to me, especially with a heavy pack interfering with my balance and steadily mounting fatigue in my legs and mind. We were only hiking for a week, and we weren’t starving. If we’d been out longer, it would have been only a matter of time before we had a mishap.
5. The Feeling of Being Alone Is Awesome
We weren’t actually alone on the North Coast Trail. At every place we camped, there was at least one other tent somewhere nearby. That’s not because the trail is crowded, but rather because there are so few places along the route that have access to drinking water and a flat place to pitch a tent. That explains why Alone contestants sometimes struggle for days to decide where to make their camp, and it also explains why the few backpackers on the North Coast Trail usually end up clustering at the same overnight spots. But hey, we felt alone!
In Alone: Frozen, all the contestants were show veterans who had notched long stays on previous seasons, so it was surprising to see several tap out really early—in one case after just five days. “There was PTSD in my body,” the eventual winner, Woniya Thibault, told Outside last year. “I didn’t think of my first season as traumatic, but then you get back out in the wilderness and you realize it was actually really hard.” Going backpacking in the same terrain gave me a glimpse—a faint one!—of just how hard it must be. But it also reminded me why people are drawn to these places, even without prize money or glory on the line. It’s a magical feeling.
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