The Machete on Alone: What Contestants Actually Use

A machete reads like an obvious pick for a show about clearing brush and processing wood by hand, but the data says otherwise. Of the 101 contestants with a recorded gear list out of 187 documented across every US, Australian, and spinoff season, only 5 carried one. None of the five won. That's a clean zero-for-five against a field where the axe and saw dominate the same cutting-tool problem the machete would theoretically solve.

Who actually picked it

Jessie Krebs carried a machete through 46 days in season 9 before placing fifth, one of the field's stronger runs among the five carriers. David Young brought one to season 13 but tapped out on day 3, placing tenth. The other three appearances all come from Alone: Skills Challenge, the non-elimination head-to-head format where placements don't carry the same weight as a standard season: Callie North, Clay Hayes, and Amós Rodriguez were each assigned a machete alongside a saw and canvas tarp for a specific episode 4 build challenge, not as a personal ten-item pick.

Contestant	Season/format	Result	Context
Jessie Krebs	US 9	5th, 46 days	Personal 10-item pick
David Young	US 13	Tapped out, day 3	Personal 10-item pick
Callie North	Skills Challenge	Ep. 4 build	Assigned episode tool
Clay Hayes	Skills Challenge	Ep. 4 build	Assigned episode tool
Amós Rodriguez	Skills Challenge	Ep. 4 build	Assigned episode tool

That leaves just two contestants across 13 US seasons who actually chose a machete for their own kit, and neither one is drawn from the warm, brush-heavy terrain the tool is built for. Season 9 filmed in northern Labrador, well north of the tree line's dense end, and season 13 filmed inside the Arctic Circle near Aklavik. A machete's strength, fast strokes through vines, cane, and soft green wood, doesn't map well onto boreal forest or tundra, which may explain more of the pattern than any judgment about the tool itself.

Even season 3, filmed in the Andes foothills of Patagonia and among the show's more temperate, forested locations, produced no personal machete pick at all; its contestants stuck with the same axe-and-saw combination that dominates the rest of the field. That absence across every recorded gear list, warm location or cold, weakens the terrain explanation on its own and points more toward the axe and saw simply being the better all-around tool regardless of climate.

Why it loses out to the axe and saw

The item catalog lists a single generic Cold Steel Latin Machete as its only product entry for the category, unverified and not tied to any contestant, which tells its own story: nobody researching the show's gear closely enough to source real product links found a machete worth naming. Against a ten-item limit, a machete competes directly with the axe and saw for the same cutting-tool slot, and both of those win that competition almost every time. An axe splits and fells; a saw cuts cleaner and safer through thick rounds with less swing risk. A machete does neither job as well in cold, dense, coniferous terrain, and every US season location on record sits north of the latitude where that tradeoff would flip in its favor.

The skills challenge episode guide covers the specific build task that put a machete in three contestants' hands at once, and axes vs. saws on Alone breaks down the tools that actually win the cutting-tool slot instead. The machete gear page has the full recorded picks, and the official rules page covers the complete approved-items list this category sits inside.