Where Was Alone Season 5 Filmed? The Location, Explained

Alone season 5 was filmed in the Khonin Nuga valley of Mongolia's Selenge Province, close to the town of Züünkharaa and the foothills of the Khentii Mountains in the country's north. It is the only season the show has ever filmed outside North America or Australia, which makes it the hardest location to place on a map from memory alone.

Terrain and climate

Khonin Nuga sits where the southern edge of the Siberian taiga meets Mongolian-Daurian forest-steppe, at elevations of roughly 900 to 1,600 meters. That mix shows up on screen as larch-dominated woodland and river valleys along the Eroo and Sharlan, giving way to open, steppe-like slopes on the drier southern faces. It is not the dense boreal lake country the show usually returns to. It is a borderland biome, half forest and half grassland, and that changes what a fishing-and-trapping strategy can actually deliver.

The climate is continental and swings hard. Contestants arrived to mild summer weather and watched it collapse into the onset of a severe early winter within weeks, with subzero nights well below freezing by the back half of the season. The region also produces violent, fast-moving storms, heavy rain, wind, and lightning rolling in with little warning, dramatic enough that the show built an entire episode around one, titled "Mongolia's Wrath." That combination, thinner forage than a true boreal lake system plus abrupt weather violence, is what made the valley harder than its relatively temperate look suggests.

How the field fared

Season 5 carried the subtitle "Redemption" for a reason: all ten contestants were returning veterans from earlier seasons, the only all-veteran cast in the show's history. That experience showed in the numbers. The field averaged 30.1 days, a mid-pack result for the franchise, better than the desert and rainforest seasons but nowhere near the sub-Arctic Canadian sites that reward strong campaigns with 70- and 80-day runs.

Sam Larson won with 60 days, the longest run of his two appearances (he had tapped out at 55 days as season 1's runner-up). He rebuilt his kit around a warmer sleeping bag and simple grain rations instead of a fishing setup, a change documented in everything he carried. Runner-up Britt Ahart lasted 56 days before tapping out over missing his family, and third-place Larry Roberts went 41 days for the same reason. The bottom of the field collapsed fast by comparison: Carleigh Fairchild was medically evacuated at day 5 for a fish hook injury, and Brad Richardson tapped out at day 7 after going without food the entire time.

Finish	Contestant	Prior season	Days lasted
1st	Sam Larson	Season 1 (runner-up, 55 days)	60
2nd	Britt Ahart	Season 3	56
3rd	Larry Roberts	Season 2	41
4th	Dave Nessia	Season 3 (73 days in Patagonia)	36
5th	Randy Champagne	Season 2	35

Dave Nessia's fourth-place finish is its own small case study in how location shapes outcomes. He had lasted 73 days in the food-rich terrain of Patagonia on season 3; back in Mongolia's thinner forest-steppe, the same skill set was worth less than half that.

For how this location stacks up against the rest of the franchise, the locations hub has the full list, and the season 5 page covers the complete cast and episode-by-episode results. The winners page tracks how Larson's 60-day run compares across all thirteen US seasons.