The Carabiner on Alone: What Contestants Actually Use

Of the 101 contestants with a recorded gear list out of 187 tracked across every US, Australian, and spinoff season, zero have ever picked a carabiner. It is on the approved ten-item roster, the item catalog carries an entry for it, and it never once shows up in a contestant's actual kit in the sourced write-ups behind this database. That is not a gap in the record, it is the record: no source, no season, no exception.

What the catalog says, and what it doesn't

The item catalog lists exactly one product example for the category, a Petzl locking carabiner in the $12-18 range, and marks it a "category example" rather than a contestant-verified pick, meaning nobody has traced it to an actual gear list. No official rule is documented for it either, no size cap, no quantity limit, nothing. Compare that to a neighboring category like climbing rope, which at least has a hard 10-meter limit on the books despite also sitting at zero recorded picks. A carabiner doesn't even get that much attention from the rulebook, because nobody has needed to write a rule for an item nobody takes.

Why a single-function connector loses the slot math

Ten items has to cover fire, water, food, cutting, and shelter, and a carabiner solves none of those by itself. It is a connector, useful only in combination with something else, rope for rappelling into a gorge camp, webbing for rigging a bear-bag hoist, a rig for a rope bridge. Most Alone locations don't hand out terrain that demands technical rope work in the first place, and on the seasons that do involve cliffs or river crossings, contestants have consistently solved the connection problem with what's already in their pack: a girth hitch, a timber hitch, a length of paracord tied off directly. Paracord alone shows up on 56 of 94 fully-recorded personal gear lists, more than half the tracked field, precisely because it does the carabiner's job and a dozen other jobs besides, using one slot instead of two.

That's the real competition a carabiner loses. It isn't up against a rope or a rock climber's rack, it's up against every other item that could take that tenth slot: a second fire-starting method, a sharpening stone, a bit of extra cordage. A carabiner offers convenience at rigging a line quickly. A knot offers the same connection for free.

Where it sits among the rarely and never picked

The carabiner isn't alone in never getting picked, but it does share the bottom tier with a specific, small set of items rather than the bulk of the approved list.

Item	Recorded picks (of 101)	Winners among them
Carabiner	0	none
Climbing rope	0	none
Ice spikes	0	none
Bear canister	0	none
Hammock	1	none
Bivy bag	4	1

The items above it in that table at least solve a problem unique to a specific terrain or climate, a bear canister for bear country, a hammock for a jungle camp. A carabiner doesn't even have that narrow niche working in its favor, which is the likeliest reason it's the flattest zero in the entire catalog rather than a near-miss like the near-zero tier described in the items nobody picks on Alone.

None of this means a contestant could never bring one, or that a future season won't be the exception. It means that across every gear list traced so far, the choice has never been made. For the complete allowed-items list and what does and doesn't carry a documented rule, see the official rules page, and for how the show's ten-item limit works in practice, the FAQ covers the mechanics.