Greg Ovens's Alone Season 3 Gear List: All 10 Items

Spoiler note: this covers how Greg Ovens's run ended in Alone Season 3.

Greg Ovens was 53 when he walked into the Andean foothills of Argentine Patagonia for Alone Season 3, the oldest kind of contestant this show tends to reward: someone who has been using the same tools for decades rather than someone testing gear for the first time. He was right to trust his kit. He lasted 51 days, longer than six of the other nine contestants, before tapping out with hypothermia after prolonged wading in the lake trying to fish. That placed him 6th out of 10. His contestant page has the rest of his background; the season itself was eventually won by Zachary Fowler at day 87, who lived mostly on trout after the show's usual coastal food sources weren't available at this inland location.

The full list

Ovens's gear list is one of the more old-school loadouts in the show's history. Nothing on it carries a modern brand name in the record, several pieces were decades old before he ever got them, and the list still got him past the halfway point of the season.

Item	What he brought	Brand/model
Knife	Custom knife, high-carbon steel with a giraffe-bone handle	Not recorded
Axe	German steel axe, roughly 60 years old	Not recorded
Saw	Crosscut saw, roughly 60 to 70 years old	Not recorded
Bow and arrows	Laminated maple recurve bow, 62 inches, 55 lb pull, with 6 carbon arrows	Not recorded
Sleeping bag	Down-filled, waterproof, rated to -40F	Not recorded
Pot	2-quart stainless steel pot with lid	Not recorded
Ferro rod	Fire starter	Not recorded
Fishing kit	Fishing line, 60 lb and 15 lb test, with 25 hooks	Not recorded
Paracord	40 meters of 550 paracord	Not recorded
Rations	Emergency food rations	Not recorded

None of the ten items in the sourced record for this contestant carry a manufacturer name, which is worth stating plainly rather than guessing at one. What is recorded in detail is age and condition: the axe and saw were both handed-down tools, decades old by the time they went to Patagonia, which fits a bushcrafter who valued proven equipment over anything untested.

How the gear held up over 51 days

The primitive bow and arrows and fishing kit gave Ovens two separate paths to protein in a location where trout turned out to be the season's dominant food source, and his eventual tap-out wasn't a starvation exit. It was a wading accident: repeated cold-water immersion while working his fishing line brought on hypothermia severe enough to end his run at day 51. A -40F sleeping bag is normally the item that keeps a contestant alive through a cold snap in camp, but it can't do anything about core temperature dropping while someone is standing in a lake for hours at a stretch.

The axe and crosscut saw are the two items that best tell you who Ovens was as a contestant. A 60-year-old axe is not a piece of gear a first-timer brings on a whim. It is the tool of someone who has already put in the years with it and trusts it more than anything newer.

Where he ranked

At 6th place out of 10, Ovens's run sits in the middle of Season 3's field, ahead of Dan Wowak (50 days, 7th), Britt Ahart (35 days, 8th), Zach Gault (8 days, 9th), and Jim Shields (3 days, 10th), all fellow Season 3 contestants profiled elsewhere on this site. Full context on how the season played out, including runner-up Carleigh Fairchild's medical evacuation at day 86 and Fowler's eventual win, is in the Season 3 guide, and the complete list of every season's winner is on the winners page.