Who Is Žiga Ogorelec on Alone Season 13? Background and Gear

Žiga Ogorelec brings one of the more academically credentialed resumes in Alone season 13 history. He is 35, from Kočevje, Slovenia (by his own account the wildest, most bear-populated corner of the country), and he holds a PhD in aquatic biology and limnology, with a research career built around bioremediation, sustainable aquaculture, and fish-zooplankton interactions. None of that is theoretical distance from the field, though. Since his teens he has pursued extreme survival challenges, and he previously completed a 270-kilometer, 15-day solo wilderness journey, the kind of credential that reads less like a hobby and more like training.

A gear list built around what he leaves out

What stands out most on his contestant page is not what he packed, it is what he did not. Season 13 contestants get ten items, and the vast majority of the cast reaches for an ax and a ferro rod as close to automatic picks. Ogorelec's list skips both.

Category	Item
Cutting	Saw, knife
Digging	Shovel
Food gathering	Gill net, bow and arrows, fishing line and hooks, snare wire
Shelter/comfort	Sleeping bag
Utility	Cooking pot, paracord

Choosing a shovel and a gill net over an ax and ferro rod is an unusual combination for this show. It suggests someone betting on shelter-digging and fishing as his primary survival levers rather than the standard wood-processing-plus-spark-ignition kit almost everyone else carries, and it lines up with a biologist's instinct to lean on aquatic food sources in a landscape as remote as the season 13 location in the Richardson Mountains.

Season 13 is billed as the show's first true World Championship, and the ten-person cast reflects that: contestants drawn from Canada, the United States, Australia, Portugal, Wales, New Zealand, and Slovenia. Ogorelec is the field's only Slovenian entrant, and his research background gives him a genuinely different analytical lens on the same Arctic terrain as the rest of the field.

No outcome to report yet

Season 13 is still airing as of this post. There is no placement or day count in the normalized data behind this site for Ogorelec, and this profile makes no claim about how far he goes. Treat any online speculation about his fate with skepticism until the relevant episodes have actually aired.

Who he is outside the competition

Away from the show, Ogorelec has spent more than 80 days living off the land across various expeditions, relying on foraging, fishing, and trapping for every meal, and he and his younger brother Miha launched a bushcraft and survival school together back in 2014. Professionally, as of mid-2026 he is reported to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Slovenia's National Institute of Biology, a role he has held since 2021, which makes him one of the more unusual pairings on the show of hard science credentials and hands-on wilderness experience.

That combination is worth keeping in mind while watching his run unfold. A contestant who studies fish-zooplankton interactions for a living and then packs a gill net over an ax is not making a random choice; it is someone applying professional intuition about a specific ecosystem to a ten-item survival kit. For more on how the World Championship format compares to earlier seasons, our season 13 page has the full cast and location details, and our FAQ covers how tap-outs and medical evacuations work if you are new to the franchise.