Who Is Jordon Bell from Alone Season 8? What Happened

Spoiler note: this covers where Jordon Bell finished in season 8.

Jordon Bell is a 43-year-old carpenter from Oak Ridge, Tennessee who appeared on season 8, the "Grizzly Mountain" season filmed at Chilko Lake, British Columbia. His full record is on his contestant page: 9th place, 19 days, tapped out citing homesickness for his family.

Who he is

Before he settled into carpentry and Tennessee, Bell spent nine years living and adventuring in Alaska in his younger days, an experience our data flags as including a close call with an avalanche. That stretch of hard, remote living is a common background for Alone contestants, more common than survival-school credentials alone, and it lines up with what he tried to build once he got to camp: a solid, well-built shelter rather than an improvised lean-to.

Season 8 is remembered for winner Clay Hayes, a professional bowyer who outlasted the field for 74 days while hunting with a self-made selfbow, and for runner-up Biko Wright's medical evacuation at day 73 after a heart condition brought on by malnutrition. Bell's run ended much earlier than either of those two, at day 19, when he chose to tap out rather than push further into a season that was already testing far more experienced woodsmen.

His gear for the Chilko Lake run

Bell's ten-item kit is fully recorded in our data, unusual for a contestant who left this early in a season:

Item	Notes
Sleeping bag	Down fill, rated to -40°F
Axe	Shelter building and firewood
Silky Katanaboy saw	Large folding saw for timber
Multitool	General repair
Ferro rod	Fire starting
Bow and arrows	Samick Sage bow
Paracord	Cordage for shelter and traps
Fishing kit	Line and hooks
Snare wire	Small-game trapping
Pot	Cooking and water

That is a complete, conventional loadout built for a cold, high-elevation location, with nothing that signals a specialized bet on one food source. You can read more about how the Samick Sage and ferro rod choices compare across seasons, and the snare wire and fishing kit pages cover how other contestants used the same categories.

What he has been up to since

As of mid-2026, Bell is reported to run his own construction company and to have settled down with his wife and son after his carpentry work took him around the country and eventually led him to Tennessee. He is also reported to share self-documented outdoor adventures on a YouTube channel. These are the kinds of low-key, consistent-with-his-background details that come up in cast retrospectives rather than a dramatic reinvention, and they track with the same trade skills that were visible in the shelter he built on camera.

Nothing in the record suggests he has pursued the survival-instructor or wilderness-education path that some former contestants take on. His story reads more as someone who returned to an existing trade and family life after a short but genuine test.

Where he fits in season 8's story

A 19-day run puts Bell in the season's lower half, well behind Hayes and Wright but ahead of contestants who tapped out in the first week. His stated reason, missing his family, is one of the two most common tap-out drivers across the show's history, alongside starvation and injury. For the season's full arc, including how Hayes' minimalist archery-focused kit carried him to 74 days, our season 8 page has the complete rundown, and the rules page explains how tap-outs and medical evacuations are scored differently within a season.