Everything David McIntyre Carried to Win Alone Season 2

Spoiler note: this covers who won season 2.

David McIntyre was a 50-year-old survival instructor from Kentwood, Michigan when he went into season 2, and it shows in how deliberately his ten items line up around one plan: stay warm, stay dry, stay fed, and give himself no reason to quit. He outlasted nine other contestants on northern Vancouver Island near Port Hardy, British Columbia, and was still standing on day 66 when producers pulled him from the island under the show's time and medical limits. He hadn't tapped out. He'd simply outlasted everyone else and taken the full $500,000.

The ten items

Item	What he brought	Verified
Axe	2 lb cruiser	Yes
Bivy bag	US Army Gore-Tex military issue	Yes
Ferro rod	No brand specified in the record	Yes
Fishing kit	270 yds 50lb test, 30 yds 100lb test, 25 circle hooks	Yes
Gill net	No brand specified in the record	Yes
Knife	Stainless steel Scandi-grind bushcraft knife	Yes
Pot	2-quart with lid	Yes
Emergency rations	5 lbs pemmican	Yes
Saw	Silky Bigboy folding saw	Yes
Sleeping bag	0°F rated	Yes

McIntyre's full list carries a "gear complete" flag in our records, meaning every item here was sourced and confirmed rather than pieced together from partial footage. You can see it laid out the same way on his contestant page.

The gear that turned a bad stretch around

McIntyre later said he lost roughly 35 pounds in his first five and a half weeks, which is a brutal number even by Alone standards, before he started regaining weight in the final stretch. What changed wasn't a new tool. It was how he used the gill net he'd already brought: paired with a seafood box trap he built on site and a floating fishing line rig, it converted a stretch of near-starvation into something closer to a working food system. That's the recurring lesson across winning lists on this site: the fishing kit and net rarely do the work alone, they do it once the contestant has built infrastructure around them.

The rest of the kit is built for a long, cold stay rather than a short, aggressive one. The 0°F sleeping bag and Gore-Tex bivy bag are a two-layer sleep system, and the raised 4x8-foot bed platform he built, topped with a thick hemlock-bough mattress, kept him off the cold ground every night of the 66 days. Pair that with a 2 lb cruiser axe and a Silky folding saw for building and firewood, and the whole list reads like someone who planned for a marathon, not a sprint.

What separated first from second

Season 2's runner-up, Larry Roberts, lasted 64 days before hunger and the mental toll of the island caught up with him, just two days short of McIntyre's finish. Third place, Jose Martinez Amoedo, tapped out on day 59 after falling off a kayak into the river. The margin at the very top of this season was thin, and McIntyre has talked about being mentally haunted during the worst of it by the memory of a can of yams sitting untouched in his home pantry, a small detail that says a lot about what late-stage hunger does to a contestant's head even with a working food system in place.

This was also the second season filmed in the Quatsino area of northern Vancouver Island. The show returned to nearly the same territory two years later for a team format won by the Baird brothers, whose own gear list looked very different from McIntyre's solo kit despite the shared terrain.

For how the prize and item rules work across every season, the rules page covers it, and every other winning list is rounded up on the winners page.