David Young's Alone Season 13 Gear List: All 10 Items

Spoiler note: this covers how David Young's Alone Season 13 run ended.

David Young, 31, is a project manager from Washington State and a former Idaho Department of Fish and Game employee. He was the first contestant eliminated from Season 13, tapping out on day 3 of the ten-person field dropped into the Richardson Mountains of Canada's Northwest Territories for the show's first World Championship format. His placement is recorded as 10th out of 10. Full season context is on our Season 13 guide; his own page is here. One sourcing note: season 13 gear lists so far come from a single detailed piece of pre-season coverage rather than multiple confirmed sources, so treat the specifics as reported until the season fills in the record.

Young's tap-out reason is on record in detail: homesickness for his wife and two young daughters, ages 1.5 and 3 months. On camera he said, "I am not in the game right now ... I don't want it." It is one of the more direct voluntary exits in the franchise, with no medical or physical complication behind it, just a father deciding the separation was not worth continuing.

The full list

Young's ten items are recorded at the category level in our data, with no brand or model attached to any of them.

Item	Brand / model	Why it mattered
Bow and arrows	Not recorded	Primary hunting tool for bigger game
Ferro rod	Not recorded	Fire starting
Sleeping bag	Not recorded	Warmth through near-Arctic nights
Snare wire	Not recorded	Passive small game hunting
Cooking pot	Not recorded	Boiling water and cooking whatever he caught
Machete	Not recorded	Clearing and general cutting in place of an ax
Fishing line and hooks	Not recorded	Backup protein from nearby water
Multitool	Not recorded	General repair and small fixes
Tarp	Not recorded	Emergency shelter or rain cover
Saw	Not recorded	Processing timber for a longer-term camp

You can see how the machete and tarp pages compare against other contestants' choices, and how the primitive bow and arrows page tracks the tool Young was leaning on for his food plan.

The machete-instead-of-ax choice

The detail that stands out in Young's list is what is missing: no ax. Most contestants build their kit around one heavy cutting tool (an ax or hatchet) plus a saw for shelter-scale wood processing. Young carried a machete and a saw instead, a lighter, faster-swinging combination better suited to clearing brush and smaller wood than to felling and splitting larger timber for a long winter camp. Paired with a full hunting and trapping spread (bow and arrows, snare wire, fishing line and hooks), the list reads like someone equipped for an active, mobile early game rather than a dug-in, months-long one.

Whether that choice would have mattered is impossible to say. Young's exit had nothing to do with his gear; it was a homesickness-driven decision made three days in, before the loadout was tested against a real food or shelter shortfall. His run stands as a reminder that the ten-item list only matters if a contestant stays in the game long enough to need it.

What his exit means for the season

Young's day-3 tap-out made him the first of what became at least two early departures in Season 13; Dave Booth followed on day 4. Both fell well short of what it typically takes to place in the field: elsewhere in the franchise, runner-up finishes have run past 60 and even 80 days (see, for instance, Larry Roberts's 64-day Season 2 run). Every contestant, Young included, worked within the same official rules allowing exactly ten items, so his early exit was a personal decision, not a gear shortfall.