Everything Clay Hayes Carried to Win Alone Season 8

Spoiler note: this post covers the outcome of Alone Season 8.

Clay Hayes didn't come into Season 8 as a generalist. He came in as a specialist, and it shows in every item he picked.

Hayes is a professional bowyer and traditional archery instructor who has spent over two decades teaching primitive and traditional archery through videos, classes, and books. He built his first bow back in 1999. So when he sat down to choose his ten items for Chilko Lake, British Columbia, the show's first true alpine, high-elevation setting, he wasn't guessing. He was equipping a bowhunter for the harshest test of his life. It worked: he outlasted nine other contestants for 74 days, beating runner-up Biko Wright (who was medically evacuated after 73 days with a heart condition brought on by malnutrition) by roughly a day. Full details on the season are in our Season 8 guide, and Hayes's own page is here.

The full list

Item	What he brought	Why it mattered
Bow and arrows	Osage orange self bow, hand-built	His signature tool, and the one that harvested a deer during the season
Axe	Granfors Bruks Scandinavian Forest Axe	Shelter and firewood work in true alpine terrain
Saw	Silky Katanaboy 650	Faster processing of bigger timber at elevation
Sleeping bag	Feathered Friends down bag, -40F rated	Non-negotiable for a high-elevation season that got genuinely cold
Pot	GSI Outdoors anodized aluminum Dutch oven, 2 quart	Cooking and rendering whatever he brought in
Multitool	Leatherman Free P4	General repair and small tasks
Fishing kit	Fluorocarbon line, 25 hooks	Backup protein source alongside the bow
Ferro rod	Bayite 1/2" x 5"	Fire starting
Paracord	5col 550 MILSPEC, 80 meters, orange	Shelter lashing and general utility
Snare wire	Unbranded	Small-game backup

You can see the full context for each of these in the gear database, including how they compare to what other winners picked, like the bow and arrows or axe pages.

The moments that made the list matter

The self-made bow wasn't just a personal touch. Hayes hunted with it all season and used it to harvest a deer, eating its heart immediately after the kill. That's the kind of outcome a specialist gear choice is supposed to produce: a tool the person trusts more than any manufactured alternative because they built it themselves.

The rest of the loadout reads as almost aggressively minimalist for someone in bear and mountain lion country. Hayes had a close encounter with a grizzly and tracked a mountain lion during his run, but his ten items don't include anything exotic for defense. He leaned on the same core categories that show up on most winning lists: cutting tools, a reliable sleeping system, and multiple ways to get food.

What it says about picking gear

If there's a lesson in Hayes's list for anyone comparing gear choices across seasons, it's that specialization beats a scattershot approach when the specialization is real. He didn't bring a bow because bows are cool. He brought a bow because he has built and shot them for over twenty years, and every other item on his list existed to support that one skill working reliably for 74 days straight.

For a wider look at how other winners built their kits differently, from Roland Welker's fixed-100-day loadout to the Baird brothers' team gear, our best axe and best saw roundups pull together the recurring choices across the whole franchise, and alone-rules has the official constraints every contestant, Hayes included, had to work within.