Where Was Alone Season 13 Filmed? The Location, Explained

Alone season 13, billed as the "World Championship," is filming in the Richardson Mountains of the Beaufort Delta, Northwest Territories, near the community of Aklavik. The site sits inside the Arctic Circle, roughly 125 miles (150 km) north of it, and about 150 km from the Mackenzie Delta site used for season 11. It is the first time the show has crowned an official international champion, drawing ten survivalists from seven countries, Canada, the United States, Australia, Wales, Slovenia, Portugal, and New Zealand, to compete on the same ground for a $500,000 prize and the title of Alone's first world champion.

Every contestant still picks up to ten personal survival items under the standard US-format gear list, so the format itself has not changed, only who is allowed to enter. That matters for this particular site, because several of the contestants come from countries with nothing like an Arctic mountain range, meaning part of what this season is testing is whether skill transfers to terrain a contestant has never actually stood on before.

Terrain, climate, and why this site is hard

Where season 11's Mackenzie Delta was mostly flat, braided river channels, the Richardson Mountains are genuine mountains, straddling the Northwest Territories-Yukon border west of Aklavik. That changes the survival math: instead of a delta full of fish within easy reach of camp, contestants are dealing with elevation, rockier ground, and less predictable water access as winter closes in. The region shares the Arctic Circle's core hazard, daylight that keeps shrinking through the season toward true polar night, paired with temperatures that push well below freezing once the cold sets in for good. Grizzly bears, wolves, and moose are all active in the area, and the show's own format notes list "punishing weather, relentless isolation, and menacing predators" as the season's defining conditions.

Because the season is still airing, there is no reliable field average yet and no winner to report. What is known so far comes from the season's early episodes. Dave Booth, a retired Alaska school principal and longtime fishing guide, lost his primary fire source on day 1, then accidentally dropped and burned his backup ferro rod in his own fire on day 4. He tapped out that same day despite having just harvested a 40-pound beaver, a case where a single gear loss undid a genuinely strong food result. David Young, a project manager and former Idaho Fish and Game employee, was the season's first contestant eliminated, leaving on day 3 citing homesickness for his wife and two young daughters.

What to watch as the season continues

Both early exits so far trace back to the same two forces that decide most Alone runs before the weather even gets extreme: a fire mistake with no backup plan, and the pull of family. With eight of the ten contestants still in the competition as those first episodes aired, and the Richardson Mountains' worst conditions still ahead in the back half of the season, the real test of this site's terrain has not fully arrived yet. We will update this piece and the season 13 hub as more results come in. In the meantime, the locations hub has the full map of every site the show has used, and our piece on how contestants survive the winter freeze covers the gear and strategy the previous Arctic seasons leaned on for exactly this kind of cold.