Who Is Joel Van Der Loon from Alone? Every Season, Explained

Spoiler note: this covers Joel Van Der Loon's runs on season 7 and Alone: The Skills Challenge, including his results in both.

Joel Van Der Loon was 34 and living in Sisters, Oregon when he first appeared on Alone season 7, though his survival background traces back much further. Van Der Loon grew up largely off-grid in South Africa and Tanzania, picking up bushcraft and hunting skills from an early age before eventually building a career teaching them. He began instructing survival courses in San Diego around 2015, then relocated to Central Oregon in 2018 to establish what is now Primal Skills Academy.

Season 7: a starvation tap-out at day 40

At the East Arm of Great Slave Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories, Van Der Loon placed 7th out of the season 7 cast, tapping out at day 40 due to starvation. That was the same fixed-100-day-threshold season eventually won outright by Roland Welker, who was the only contestant to reach it and claim the full $1,000,000 prize. The site's gear database doesn't have a fully sourced item list for his season 7 kit, so there's no detailed equipment breakdown to draw from for that run specifically.

Alone: The Skills Challenge: a strong return

Van Der Loon came back for Alone: The Skills Challenge, a spin-off format where three head-to-head competitors build against each other on their own home turf per episode rather than surviving together in one location, and there is no single crowned winner or prize (the format's own notes state explicitly that no prize exists for winning a challenge). He competed as a contestant in 5 of the show's 12 episodes: Episode 6 ("Elevated Shelter with Food Storage"), Episode 8 ("Fishing Kit & Smoker"), Episode 9 ("Floating Shelter"), Episode 10 ("Nature-Powered Rotisserie"), and Episode 12 ("Pocket Survival"). He won two of those five (Episode 8 and Episode 12) and lost three (Episodes 6, 9, and 10), and also served as episode judge once, in Episode 11. His two wins tied him with Lucas Miller for second-most wins in the format.

Episode	Challenge	Result
6	Elevated Shelter with Food Storage	Loss
8	Fishing Kit & Smoker	Win
9	Floating Shelter	Loss
10	Nature-Powered Rotisserie	Loss
11	(judge)	N/A
12	Pocket Survival	Win

His tools varied by episode rather than being a single fixed kit, ranging from a knife, saw, paracord, and canvas tarp in Episode 6 to a parang, saw, and paracord in Episode 9, down to no tools at all for the pockets-only Episode 12 challenge that he won.

What happened after the show

As of mid-2026, Van Der Loon lives in Sisters, Oregon with his wife and son, and runs Primal Skills Academy, a wilderness survival and bushcraft school offering hunting and survival classes across Central Oregon. Reporting on his school describes clients ranging from ordinary families to celebrities and military groups, and he has spoken about drawing on skills learned directly from the Hadzabe hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, Maasai herdsmen, and Rama communities in Nicaragua over years of travel through roughly 40 countries.

Where he fits across both formats

Van Der Loon is one of the small group of Alone contestants to appear in both a numbered season and the Skills Challenge spin-off, and his results across the two (a respectable 40-day run in the original format, a tied-second finish in the head-to-head format) reflect the same broad-based bushcraft skill set rather than a specialist strategy. His season 7 contestant page and Skills Challenge contestant page both have his full records, and the season 7 page and Skills Challenge page cover the rest of each cast.