The Ice Spikes on Alone: What Contestants Actually Use

Ice spikes, the traction aid crampon-style attachments that strap to boots for walking safely on frozen ground, have never once appeared on a documented Alone gear list. Of the 101 contestants with a recorded ten-item kit out of 187 tracked across every US, Australian, and spinoff season, zero carried them. No source, no season, no exception, and no documented rule capping or banning them either. It simply is not a pick anyone has made, in a database that includes some of the coldest, iciest filming locations the show has ever used.

The locations that would seem to call for it

Several winning seasons were filmed in places where a frozen lake is part of daily life. Jordan Jonas won season 6 and Roland Welker won season 7, both at Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, a location cold enough to produce lake ice thick enough to walk, fish, and haul gear across for months. Sam Larson won season 5 in Mongolia carrying a bag rated to negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit. William Larkham Jr. won season 11 in the Mackenzie River Delta with a bag rated to negative 100, the most extreme rating in the recorded data. Every one of those contestants would have spent real time on ice. None of them are recorded carrying a dedicated traction device for it.

What the data suggests happens instead

The gear lists from those same seasons show contestants leaning on tools they were already carrying for other jobs rather than a single-purpose ice tool. An axe, present on the vast majority of winning lists, doubles as a way to test ice thickness or chop through it for a fishing hole. Boots and improvised footwear modifications don't show up as their own gear category in this data at all, which suggests traction, when it's handled, gets handled with what's on a contestant's feet already or with caution and route-finding rather than dedicated hardware. None of that is confirmed by a named source describing exactly how any specific contestant crossed ice safely, so this is a reasonable inference from the ten-item math rather than a documented explanation.

A zero that matches its neighbor, the auger

Ice spikes aren't the only cold-specific tool sitting at zero in the personal gear lists. The auger, a hand tool for drilling through ice, shows the same pattern: no contestant has picked one as a personal item, despite several seasons being filmed on exactly the kind of frozen lake an auger would be built for.

Item	Category	Recorded picks (of 101)
Ice spikes	Cold-weather traction	0
Auger	Cold-weather tool	0 (personal lists)
Climbing rope	Technical/shelter	0
Bear canister	Region-specific	0

The likeliest explanation is the same ten-item math that governs every other category on this list. A dedicated ice tool solves a narrow, occasional problem, crossing or drilling through ice safely, against items that solve a problem every single day of a run: fire, food, and a blade that cuts wood. Given a fixed ten slots, contestants have consistently bet on the tools with daily utility over the tools with situational utility, even in locations where that situational problem is real.

None of this means ice hazards don't matter on Alone. It means that whatever contestants have done to manage them, it hasn't involved packing a dedicated traction device, at least not in any gear list traced so far. For the broader pattern of items that never get picked and why, see the items nobody picks on Alone. For how the show's coldest seasons play out overall, winter on Alone: how contestants survive the freeze and every Alone location ranked by brutality go deeper on the terrain itself. The complete allowed-items list is on the official rules page.