Everything Jim Baird Carried to Win Alone Season 4

Spoiler note: this covers who won season 4 and how they got there.

Season 4, "Lost & Found," is the one everyone forgets was a team season until they rewatch it. Instead of ten solo strangers, seven pairs (siblings, parents and kids, one married couple) were dropped on Quatsino Territory on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Jim Baird and his brother Ted, freelance outdoorsmen from Toronto, were dropped separately and didn't even reunite at their shared camp until day 10. They still went on to outlast every other team and became the first Canadians to win Alone, tapping out on day 75 with $500,000 split between them.

Because they competed as a linked pair, Jim and Ted's gear lists are identical. Here is everything they picked.

The ten items

Item	What they picked	Why it mattered
Axe	Fiskars X15, painted orange	Standard camp-building and firewood tool; the orange paint job makes it easy to find in ferns
Bow and arrows	Samick Sage takedown recurve, 50+ lb draw	Heavier draw weight than most contestants pick, useful for deer-sized game
Fishing kit	20-lb and 50-lb monofilament, 30-lb braid, 25 hooks	Doubled up line strengths for both small fish and bigger predators
Gill net	12' x 4'	Passive fishing that works around the clock without either brother tending it
Multitool	Leatherman Surge	General repair and small tasks
Pot	Toaks titanium 2L with bail handle	Lightweight, and the bail handle lets it hang directly over a fire
Rations	2 lbs pemmican	Emergency calories for the early days before a food system was running
Saw	Lynx 3' one-man crosscut	Built for team-scale construction, not just kindling
Snare wire	3.5 lbs of trapping wire	Passive land-based food gathering while they focused on fishing
Tarp	12' x 12'	Shelter material and boat-building material both

You can see the full list, plus every other team's picks, on Jim's contestant page and Ted's.

Built for two people, not one

What stands out about this list is how little of it is redundant once you remember two people were living off it. A single 12x12 tarp and one crosscut saw only make sense if you're building something bigger than a one-person lean-to, and that's exactly what happened. The brothers built a canoe-style boat to work their lake for fish, which is the kind of project that's basically impossible solo but reasonable with two sets of hands and a saw built for real cutting, not just notching sticks.

The gill net and the heavier fishing line tell the same story. A gill net catches fish whether or not anyone is standing there, which freed up daylight hours for building, hunting, and eventually just managing the psychological grind of month two. Compare that to a contestant who has to actively fish every day, and you start to see why passive food systems show up again and again on the gear database among long-runners.

Where the plan almost broke

None of this made the back half of the season easy. As food supplies thinned into fall and winter, Jim and Ted leaned on scavenged limpets off the shoreline to stretch what they had, and by their own account tensions between the brothers frayed under the pressure without ever fully breaking. That's worth remembering before assuming a shared gear list and a head start on shelter makes a team season easier. It changes which problems you face, not whether you face any.

They beat the runner-up team, Pete and Sam Brockdorff, by a single day. The Brockdorffs tapped out jointly at day 74 after Pete developed severe GERD from prolonged food deprivation, which is a reminder of how thin the margin was at the top of this particular season even with two people sharing the load.

If you want to see how the prize money and item rules actually work across seasons, the rules page breaks it down, and every other winner is rounded up in one place if you want to compare kits.