Who Is Sarah Poynter from Alone Season 11? What Happened

Spoiler note: this covers how Sarah Poynter's season 11 run ended.

Sarah Poynter was 48 and from Skwentna, Alaska, when she joined season 11, filmed in the Mackenzie River Delta about 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle near Inuvik, one of the more remote locations the franchise has used. Her background already put her ahead of most contestants on paper: she runs a fishing lodge with her husband, meaning her day job is essentially the skill set the show is built around.

That background showed in her results. Poynter placed 4th out of 10 on her contestant page, lasting 42 days before tapping out due to kidney pain that had become sharp enough to threaten her ability to continue safely. Season 11 was won by William Larkham Jr. at 84 days, with runner-up Timber Cleghorn one day behind at 83 and third-place Dub Paetz at 80. All three frontrunners doubled Poynter's day count or more, but her 42 days still put her comfortably in the top half of a ten-person field.

Her gear list is one of the few in the site's data marked fully sourced, which makes it worth a full look next to her result:

Item	Category
Sleeping bag	Shelter/warmth
Paracord	Utility
2-quart pot	Cooking
Ferro rod	Fire-starting
Snare wire	Trapping
Fishing line and hooks	Fishing
Bow and arrows	Hunting
Hatchet	Cutting tool
Saw	Cutting tool
Multitool	Utility

It's a balanced, cover-every-base kit rather than a specialist's loadout, hunting, fishing, and trapping gear all represented alongside two separate cutting tools and a full fire-starting setup. That kind of spread is common among contestants with genuine backcountry experience who'd rather stay flexible than bet everything on one food-gathering method.

Life before and after Alone

Poynter and her husband Chris operate TalVista Lodge at the mouth of the Talachalitna River in Alaska, which reporting describes as their primary source of income, guiding clients on fishing and nature tours through the region. That lodge work predates her season 11 appearance and continues to be her main occupation.

As of mid-2026, Poynter is reported to still be running the lodge full time from her home base in Skwentna, and to have stayed close with fellow contestant Michela Carriere, a friendship reporting describes as having formed during the season and continued since. She's also described as spending time teaching her grandchildren outdoor skills, a continuation of the same hands-on approach that shaped her kidney-pain tap-out call: she left when she judged the risk had crossed a line, rather than pushing further into a health problem she was already familiar with reading correctly.

How her gear and result compare

Poynter's full kit and her 4th-place finish make her one of the clearer examples of "prepared but not lucky" in the show's run: a contestant with real professional-level outdoor experience and a well-rounded kit still loses to whatever internal factor (in her case, a kidney issue that had nothing to do with skill or preparation) ends a run.

For the complete season 11 order of finish, our season 11 page has the full breakdown. If you want to see how her gear picks compare to other contestants' choices, our snare wire and ferro rod gear pages cover those items in more depth, and the winners page has the complete list of every season champion.