Who Is Jacks Genega on Alone Season 13? Background and Gear

Alone season 13 is billed as the show's first World Championship, and Jacks Genega is one of the more unusual entries in that cast: a 40 year old from New York who spent years as a video editor in New York City and Amsterdam before walking away from that career entirely to teach wilderness skills full time out of a van. Season 13 is still airing as of this post, so nothing here covers placement, days lasted, or how her run ends. This is a background and gear profile only.

Who she is

Genega's path into survival skills did not start with a childhood in the woods. By her own account and reporting on her wilderness school, she came to bushcraft as an adult, eventually completing a year-long intensive program at Woodland Ways in Scotland's East Lothian region, sometimes referred to as the Northern Forest Year. That training turned into a full career shift: she founded Wildcard Wilderness Survival, a school built around teaching self-reliance and bushcraft, and has run programs including a Women's Wilderness Survival course and expeditions ranging from the Sonoran Desert to bushcraft meetups in Georgia.

On our contestant page, the show's own casting notes describe her the same way: a wilderness skills educator who traded video editing for van life. She is reported to be the only woman in the season 13 field, a detail that has been noted in several outlets covering the cast for what production has framed as the first Alone World Championship.

The season 13 setting

Season 13 is filmed in the Richardson Mountains of the Beaufort Delta, Northwest Territories, Canada, near Aklavik and inside the Arctic Circle, roughly 150 km from the season 11 filming site near Inuvik. The prize is a flat $500,000 to whoever outlasts the rest of the field, along with the title of first-ever Alone World Champion. The season premiered June 17, 2026, and was still airing as of this post, so no placement or day-count information can be reported here yet.

Her gear list

Genega's ten-item loadout, per our normalized gear data, is one of the more balanced kits in the season 13 cast:

Category	Item
Fire	Ferro rod
Food gathering	Fishing line and hooks, snare wire, bow and arrows
Shelter/warmth	Sleeping bag, paracord
Tools	Axe, saw, multitool
Cooking	Cooking pot

That mix covers all three of Alone's core survival pillars (fire, shelter, food) without leaning unusually hard on any single category, which fits someone whose background is teaching general bushcraft fundamentals rather than one specialty like trapping or bowhunting.

Why her background stands out in this cast

Most Alone contestants either grew up around survivalism through family or came to it through a single specialty like guiding, trapping, or military training. Genega's arc, leaving a media career in two major cities to build a bushcraft school from scratch, is a less common entry point for the show, and it lines up with the kind of contestant Alone has increasingly cast in recent seasons: people who chose this life deliberately as adults rather than inheriting it.

Because season 13 is ongoing, this post will not speculate about how far she goes or what her tap-out looks like. For the full field and how the World Championship format works, the season 13 page has the complete cast list, and our rules explainer covers how judging, medical evacuation, and the win condition work on this show. Once the season finishes airing, her contestant page will be updated with placement and day count like every other profile on this site.