Who Is Benji Hill from Alone Season 9? What Happened

Spoiler note: this covers Benji Hill's placement and how his season 9 run ended.

Benji Hill is a 46 year old hunting and pack-goat adventure guide from Bellevue, Idaho, and one of the more unusual athletic backgrounds in the Alone cast. Our normalized data describes him as a former world-champion powerlifter, and reporting on his background fills in the specifics: he won the powerlifting World Championships in Calgary in 2003, competing as an underdog at 220 pounds. He also spent 19 years teaching health and fitness at a local gym before shifting toward guiding.

That guiding business is GoatProIdaho, a pack-goat touring company Benji owns and operates, built on more than 30 years of bowhunting experience in Idaho's backcountry. That bowhunting background lines up directly with the bow and arrows listed among his ten items on season 9, filmed at Big River in the Nunatsiavut region of northern Labrador.

Pack goats are used for hauling gear on long backcountry trips, letting hunters and clients travel deeper into remote terrain than they could carry supplies for on foot alone, and that same instinct for deep-wilderness self-sufficiency is a natural fit for what Alone actually demands once a contestant is dropped at their site.

How his run went

Benji placed eighth, lasting 27 days before a medical evacuation for a giardia infection, a waterborne parasite that causes severe gastrointestinal illness and is a real risk anywhere a contestant is drinking untreated water for weeks at a stretch. Our data records his full ten-item kit as including a ferro rod, an axe, a multitool, paracord, salt, a 2-quart pot, trapping wire, and fishing line and hooks alongside the bow, a fairly balanced loadout that leaned on his hunting strength rather than a heavier reliance on trapping or fishing.

Reporting on his season goal says Benji was aiming for 102 days, enough to set a new record for the show at the time. An illness-driven exit at day 27 is a reminder of how much of an Alone run comes down to factors a contestant cannot fully control once solid food and water sourcing are underway for weeks on end, regardless of hunting skill or physical conditioning.

The gap between his stated 102-day goal and the actual 27-day result is a large one, but it says more about how unpredictable a waterborne illness can be than about his underlying preparation. Giardia and similar infections have ended more than one strong Alone run early, regardless of how experienced the contestant is with wilderness water sourcing.

After the show

As of mid-2026, Benji continues to run GoatProIdaho and maintains a public profile built around his outdoor guiding work in Idaho, rather than pivoting into a full-time survival-instruction career the way some other contestants have. He has also written and spoken about his backcountry experience in outlets covering the Idaho outdoor scene since his season 9 appearance.

That continuity, running the same guiding business before and after the show, suggests his season 9 appearance was more of a personal challenge tied to his existing outdoor identity than an attempt to launch a new career off the back of television exposure.

For the full season 9 cast and how Benji's eighth-place finish compares, our season 9 page has the complete breakdown. If you want to see how other contestants have used a similar bow-forward strategy, our gear guides round up the most commonly packed items across every season.