Who Is Will Longley on Alone Season 13? Background and Gear

Will Longley is one of the more distinctive casting picks in Alone season 13, the show's first "World Championship" format. He is 37, a stay-at-home dad, and his hometown is listed as Kotzebue, Alaska, though he grew up partly in Nuuk as well. He is Inupiaq, and rather than the generic bushcraft background common to a lot of the cast, his approach to the competition is built directly on ancestral Inupiaq hunting, fishing, and food-preservation methods passed down through his family.

That framing matters for how to read his run so far. Season 13 dropped its international field into the Richardson Mountains of the Beaufort Delta, Northwest Territories, deep inside the Arctic Circle and roughly 150 km from where season 11 filmed near Inuvik. It is punishing, high-latitude terrain, and Longley's pitch to producers was explicitly that traditional Arctic Indigenous knowledge, not just gym-built endurance, is what actually gets people through a place like this.

What his gear says about his strategy

His full contestant page lists ten items, which is the standard allotment for this format. The mix leans hard into subsistence harvesting rather than pure survival minimalism.

Category	Item
Cutting	Ax, saw
Fire	Ferro rod
Food gathering	Gill net, bow and arrows, snare wire
Shelter/comfort	Sleeping bag, multitool
Utility	Cooking pot, paracord

A gill net and a bow paired with snare wire is a fishing-and-hunting-first kit, which fits someone whose entire angle is harvesting food the way his family has for generations rather than leaning on foraging or trapping alone. It is not a radically unusual list next to the rest of the season 13 cast, but the choices read as deliberate rather than default.

No outcome to report yet

Season 13 is still airing as of this post, so there is no placement or day count to share here, and none of the normalized data behind this site includes one for Longley. Anything claiming to know how far he goes should be treated with real skepticism until the episodes actually air; this profile sticks to background and gear rather than guessing at his fate.

Who he is outside the competition

Away from the show, Longley has built a public presence around preserving and sharing Inupiaq traditions. He has talked about learning to hunt and harvest from the land and sea using Inupiaq tools and methods, and, as of mid-2026, he reportedly continues to post about indigenous hunting practices, food preservation, and daily life in remote Arctic communities. That is consistent with how he has framed his time on Alone: less a personal survival test and more a chance to put a specific cultural skill set in front of a national audience.

For viewers trying to place him against the rest of the field, it helps to read the season 13 page directly, since the show's casting notes and premiere details there give the fuller context for why an Inupiaq subsistence approach stands out in a World Championship field pulled from multiple countries. If you are still catching up on how tap-outs, medical evacuations, and the overall format work before diving into a season this competitive, our rules explainer, FAQ, and where to watch pages cover the practical side without spoiling anything about who is still out there.