Where Is Nathan Olsen Now? Life After Winning Alone Season 12

Spoiler note: this covers who won season 12.

Nathan Olsen won season 12, the show's first desert edition, filmed in South Africa's Great Karoo. He was a 52-year-old tech executive from Buhl, Idaho, and he lasted 34 days, which is the shortest winning run in the show's history. That number is not a knock on him. The Karoo produced brutal attrition, with four contestants gone inside the first five days and only Olsen and runner-up Kelsey Loper making it past a month, a pattern producers compared to the original season 1. Olsen built up real food stores anyway, catching enough fish that he described the acacia trees around his camp as loaded with drying strips. His fishing kit and bow did the heavy lifting, and the full loadout is on his contestant page and in everything Nathan Olsen carried.

Placement	Contestant	Days lasted	Outcome
1	Nathan Olsen	34	Won, $500K prize
2	Kelsey Loper	33	Left, lack of food
3	Katie Rydge	28	Chose to leave

What he has been up to since

This is a recent season, so the "where is he now" picture is thinner than it is for the early champions, and I am keeping the claims to what coverage actually supports. As of mid-2026, Olsen is reported to be back home in Buhl, Idaho, where he is CEO of BestNotes, a behavioral-health software company he helped start in 2005. He and his wife Erica are reported to raise a blended family of ten children. In the run of interviews right after the finale aired he described the win as bittersweet, saying he had not been ready to leave and still felt he had everything he needed to continue.

The one thread that ties the show to the rest of his life is wilderness therapy. Before the tech career he guided for the Anasazi Foundation, an outdoor therapeutic program his father helped found, and he is reported to still return to support that work, which lines up with a man who treated 34 days in a desert as a manageable problem rather than an ordeal. Beyond that, most of what is out there is the standard post-finale local-news and radio circuit rather than a new venture, so I am not going to invent a business or a book that the sources do not show. When more surfaces, it will be worth updating, but honest and thin beats confident and wrong.

Why his win reads differently

Olsen's season is a useful reminder that the days-lasted number only means something against its own location. Thirty-four days in a water-scarce desert that broke half the cast inside a week is not a soft win, and his brother Luke Olsen, who competed back in season 10, gave the family a second data point on how much harder these environments play than they look on screen.

The desert also flipped the usual priorities. Where cold-weather winners obsess over insulation and firewood, the Karoo made water and shade the whole game, and several contestants that season used one of their ten picks on a water bottle. For where his short, decisive run sits among the champions, the winners roundup lists every winner across every version, and the gear database shows how a desert kit differs from the cold-weather loadouts that dominate the rest of the franchise.