Where Is Clay Hayes Now? Life After Winning Alone Season 8

Spoiler note: this covers who won season 8.

Clay Hayes is the contestant Alone fans point to when they want to argue that the show rewards skill over luck. A professional bowyer and traditional archery instructor, he lasted 74 days at Chilko Lake, British Columbia, the show's first true alpine, high-elevation location, and beat runner-up Biko Wright by roughly a single day. Wright was medically evacuated at day 73 with a heart condition brought on by malnutrition, which is how close season 8 actually was at the top even though Hayes's win looks decisive on paper.

What made his run notable

Hayes hunted with a self-made Osage orange selfbow rather than a store-bought recurve, killed a deer during the season, and ate its heart immediately after the kill. He also had a close encounter with a grizzly bear and tracked a mountain lion at various points, which is part of why the season carries the "Grizzly Mountain" subtitle. His full ten-item gear list is one of the more disciplined, minimalist kits in the show's history: a Granfors Bruks axe, a Silky Katanaboy saw, a GSI Outdoors Dutch oven pot, and a -40F Feathered Friends down sleeping bag, alongside his own bow.

That discipline didn't come from nowhere. Hayes had already spent over two decades teaching primitive and traditional archery through videos, classes, and books by the time he was cast, having built his first working bow back in 1999.

What he's done since the show

As of mid-2026, Hayes has stayed almost entirely in the same lane that got him cast in the first place. He continues to run in-person classes and instructional content on bow building and traditional archery, and his YouTube channel and related media presence have grown since his season aired, with regular videos on primitive skills and bowmaking. Reporting around his win consistently describes him living in North Idaho near Lewiston, not far from Kendrick, Idaho, which is the hometown listed for him during his original season.

He also returned to the franchise for Alone: The Skills Challenge, the spin-off that pits past contestants against each other in single-episode skill builds rather than a long endurance run. He competed in 6 of that show's 12 episodes and won one of them, the "Wilderness Watercraft" challenge, which tracks with a guy who spent a full season building things with a saw and an axe on Vancouver Island's northern cousin lake system.

Personal details beyond that, like exactly who he lives with day to day, are reported inconsistently enough across outlets that I'll leave them general rather than state them as settled fact here. What's consistent across sources is the throughline: professional bowyer before the show, professional bowyer and teacher after it, with a much bigger audience.

Why his story holds up

A lot of Alone winners talk about the show changing their life's direction. Hayes is a rarer case: the show mostly confirmed a direction he was already headed in and gave it a much wider audience. That's a big part of why his gear list reads the way it does. Nothing on it looks chosen for a camera. It looks chosen by someone who had already spent twenty years thinking about exactly this problem.

If you want to see how his kit compares to other long-running winners, the gear database has the full catalog, and the winners roundup covers what happened to the rest of the field who've been tracked down.