Everything Juan Pablo Quiñonez Carried to Win Alone Season 9

Spoiler note: this covers who won season 9.

Juan Pablo Quiñonez won Alone season 9 by lasting 78 days on the banks of Labrador's Big River, becoming the first Latino champion in the show's history along the way. His kit, listed in full on his season 9 contestant page, was one of the more inventive loadouts the show had seen up to that point.

The full ten

His items were a prototype hatchet he called the JP PAXE, a Fleetwood Timber Ridge takedown recurve bow, a Bayite ferro rod, a fishing kit combining 20-lb monofilament and fly line and hooks, a Leatherman Charge Plus multitool with G10 scales, 80 meters of Extremus paracord, an MSR Alpine Stowaway pot, a folding Tuff Camp bow saw, a -30°F rated Spiritwest sleeping bag, and both 20-gauge stainless and 22-gauge bronze snare wire.

Item	The interesting part
Ferro rod	Used a Corona blade sharpener as the striker instead of the standard tool
Fishing kit	Combined heavy monofilament with fly fishing line for range across water types
Hatchet (prototype)	Homemade design, not a stock retail item
Sleeping bag	-30°F rating for boreal Labrador cold
Snare wire	Two different gauges carried side by side

Why the fishing setup mattered so much

Big River wasn't a location where a single food strategy dominated. Quiñonez built his approach around fishing first, pairing fly line and hooks with heavier monofilament so he could work different parts of the river depending on conditions, then backed that up with the takedown recurve bow for larger game. That combination of a flexible fishing setup plus a bow gave him more than one way to eat on a day when either method came up empty, which matters enormously over 78 days.

The blade-sharpener-as-ferro-striker trick is a small detail, but it's the kind of workaround that shows up when someone treats their gear list as a toolkit to be adapted rather than used exactly as intended.

The field he outlasted

Runner-up Karie Lee Knoke made it to day 75, tapping out from starvation and exhaustion just three days before the season ended, a brutally close finish. Teimojin Tan left at day 63 missing his family, and Adam Riley tapped at day 52 from starvation. You can see the full placement order and every tap-out reason on the season 9 guide.

That closeness with Knoke is part of what makes this season stand out. Quiñonez didn't win by a wide margin of days, he won by holding on through the same brutal caloric deficit that took her out, just three days later.

Why this gear list gets cited

This is one of the more frequently referenced loadouts among survival gear enthusiasts specifically because so little of it is stock. A homemade hatchet prototype and a repurposed sharpener as a fire striker both suggest someone thinking about failure points before they happen, not just packing a checklist. If you're comparing loadouts across seasons, the full gear database makes it easy to see how much variation there really is even within the same ten-item structure, and the official rules page covers what's allowed if you want to build your own list.