Tom Garstang's Alone Season 9 Gear List: All 10 Items

Spoiler note: this covers how Season 9 ended and where Tom Garstang finished.

Tom Garstang is a prescribed-fire practitioner and regenerative agriculturist born in South Africa, the son of a game ranger, who came into Season 9 with a working knowledge of fire and land management most contestants do not have. He lasted 43 days before a fall injured his back and knee, ending his run in sixth place. His full contestant profile has more on his background.

Sixth place put him just behind Jessie Krebs's 46 days and ahead of the bottom half of the cast, on the same stretch of Big River in northern Labrador that tested every contestant's shelter and fire setup against cold, wet boreal conditions. Unlike most tap-outs on this season, which came down to starvation or homesickness, Garstang's ending was a physical accident rather than a gear or willpower failure.

The full list

Item	Brand/model	Notes
Bow and arrows	Not recorded	Hunting
Axe	Not recorded	Shelter building and firewood
Paracord	Not recorded	Shelter lashing and utility cordage
Ferro rod	Not recorded	Fire starting
Trapping wire	Not recorded	Small-game snares
Fishing line and hooks	Not recorded	Protein source
2-quart pot	Not recorded	Cooking and water
Multitool	Not recorded	General repair
Sleeping bag	Not recorded	Insulation for the boreal cold
Folding saw	Not recorded	Timber processing alongside the axe

No brand or model is publicly recorded for any of Garstang's ten items. His list follows the same conventional pattern most of this season's cast relied on: axe and saw for shelter and fire, bow plus fishing line and trapping wire for three separate food-gathering methods, and a sleeping bag and pot rounding out the basics. It is close to a textbook ten-item loadout for this location. You can compare his food-gathering choices to the rest of the field on the bow and arrows, fishing line and hooks, and trapping wire pages.

What the list says about his run

A fall injury is a reminder that gear planning only covers so much of what determines how long a contestant lasts. Garstang's kit gave him solid coverage across shelter, fire, and three separate food sources, and there is no indication his loadout was thin or mismatched for the terrain. His background in fire and land management likely made the axe-and-saw shelter work more efficient than for less experienced contestants, but a physical accident like a fall can end a run regardless of how well-prepared someone is on paper.

Season 9 in context

Garstang's 43 days sits in the lower-middle of Season 9's placement order, well ahead of the two contestants who tapped out inside the first three weeks. For the complete comparison of what every recorded contestant that season carried, our Season 9 gear roundup has the full breakdown, and alone-rules covers the ten-item cap every contestant, Garstang included, worked within.

Across the show's full run of 19 recorded seasons and spinoffs, only 101 of 187 total contestants have a documented ten-item list at all, so Garstang's fully sourced kit puts him in the smaller, better-recorded half of the franchise's history. That matters for comparison posts like this one: plenty of contestants from earlier or less-covered seasons simply do not have enough surviving detail to line up side by side with a list this complete.