Who Is Nicole Apelian from Alone? Every Season, Explained

Spoiler note: this covers Nicole Apelian's results on seasons 2 and 5.

Nicole Apelian is one of the few Alone contestants who became more famous after the show than during it, and her two runs explain why. She first appeared on season 2 at age 45, listing Portland, Oregon as her home, and finished in 4th place after 57 days, tapping out because she missed her kids. She came back for season 5 at 47, then living in Raymond, Washington, and lasted only 9 days before being medically evacuated following a Multiple Sclerosis attack.

That MS diagnosis is the throughline of her whole story. She was diagnosed in 2000, years before she ever applied for Alone, and going into season 2 as a biologist, anthropologist, and wildlife safari guide managing a chronic illness in one of the show's harshest locations was already a notable premise. Her season 5 exit for an MS flare, rather than hunger or loneliness, is a different kind of ending than most contestants get, and the show treated it as a medical evacuation rather than a voluntary tap-out.

How her gear compares across seasons

Her season 5 contestant page has a fully recorded 10-item list: a knife reported elsewhere as a Ron Macy kukri, a saw, a sleeping bag, a ferro rod, a multi-tool reported elsewhere as a Leatherman Charge TTi, a cooking pot, fishing line and hooks, a gill net, trapping wire, and a food ration. Her season 2 gear was never fully sourced in our records, so a direct item-by-item comparison between her two runs is not something we can back with data, but the season 5 list is a fairly standard "cover fishing, trapping, and fire" loadout for someone who had already lasted 57 days on a prior season and knew what mattered.

Season	Age	Placement	Days	Outcome
Season 2	45	4th	57	Tapped out, missed her kids
Season 5	47	8th	9	Medically evacuated, MS attack

Who she is off the show

Apelian holds a PhD and has built a public career around herbal medicine and wilderness skills. According to her own site, she relocated in 2017 to the Willapa Hills in rural southwest Washington, where she keeps four organic gardens, a 40-tree orchard, and chickens. As of mid-2026, she has authored multiple books, including "The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies" and "A Reference Guide to Surviving Nature," and runs online programs through the Lost Remedies Herbal Academy and the Prepare Long-Term Survival Academy, alongside in-person workshops on her land.

She also continues a long-running collaboration with San Bushmen communities in Western Botswana through The Origins Project, a nonprofit she co-founded, describing it as a cultural education effort built on mutual exchange rather than a one-way study of indigenous knowledge. On the health side, she has become a visible voice for managing MS naturally, sharing diet, herb, and lifestyle strategies for other people living with the condition, an extension of the same story that ended her season 5 run early.

Few contestants get to be the answer to "who won" and "who has an interesting life after the show" in the same breath, since Apelian never won a season outright. What she has instead is a rare double appearance where the through-line (a serious autoimmune condition managed in real time, on camera, in two different wildernesses) is more compelling than a placement number. For more on how season 2 and season 5 played out overall, our season pages round up the full casts and results, and the FAQ covers general questions about how tap-outs and medical evacuations are scored on the show.