Who Won Alone: Frozen? Woniya Thibeault's Win, Explained

Spoiler note: this covers who won Alone: Frozen.

Woniya Thibeault won Alone: Frozen, the spinoff that dropped six returning US contestants onto the North Atlantic coast of Labrador, Newfoundland and Labrador, by reaching the format's fixed 50-day cap. She was the only one of the six to get there, which under the spinoff's split-prize structure meant she took the entire $500,000 rather than sharing it, per our Frozen season page.

How the win happened

Frozen wasn't a standard Alone season. Contestants were dropped off much closer to the true onset of winter than usual, front-loading the hardest conditions instead of letting them build gradually, and the win condition was a hard 50-day cap rather than open-ended survival. The $500,000 prize was structured to be split among however many people reached that cap, a format built around the assumption that more than one contestant might make it.

Thibeault, an ancestral-skills teacher from Grass Valley, California who runs the school Buckskin Revolution, had already been through a version of this. She was the runner-up on Alone season 6 in 2019, lasting 73 days on Great Slave Lake before tapping out from starvation. Coming back for Frozen, she focused on reinforcing her shelter, including building a wooden door, maintaining a trapline for rabbits, and attempting ice fishing, while staying deliberately cautious near the end of the run specifically to avoid an injury-related tap-out that would have cost her the prize.

That caution paid off. She reached day 50, the only contestant of the six to do so, and became the first woman to win any season of the Alone franchise, a distinction that predates Gina Chick's Alone Australia win by roughly eight months. Because Frozen's prize was designed to split among multiple potential finishers, her solo finish meant a structural quirk worked entirely in her favor: she claimed the full amount despite the format never being built around one person taking it all.

Key gear

A verified, fully-sourced 10-item gear list doesn't exist for Frozen the way it does for most numbered seasons; even Woniya's list is flagged by its original source as a reconstruction from watching the show rather than an officially published kit. With that caveat, her documented loadout included a camp axe, a modified Leatherman Surge multitool, a Silky Katanaboy folding saw (also modified), a 6-quart pot, a ferro rod, bow and arrows, a fishing kit, snare wire, a sleeping bag, and roughly 2 pounds of pemmican as her ration item. The sleeping bag mattered more than usual here given how much earlier in the season the harsh cold set in compared to a standard Alone shoot.

Season snapshot

Placement	Contestant	Days lasted
1st (winner)	Woniya Thibeault	50
2nd	Michelle Finn	38
3rd	Callie Russell	26

The gap between first and second place here (12 days) is wide by the franchise's standards, a reflection of how brutal the format's front-loaded winter conditions were for everyone except the eventual winner.

Frozen aired 8 episodes across August and September 2022, all six contestants having already competed on a prior numbered season of the US show, which is part of what made it feel more like a returning-champions special than a normal casting cycle. The producers' choice to drop the cast into conditions closer to deep winter than a standard premiere date, rather than let cold build gradually the way most seasons do, is the single biggest reason this spinoff's day counts run so much lower across the board than the numbered US seasons.

For more on exactly how Frozen's format differed from a standard season, our comparison piece breaks down the rule changes in detail, and our winners page has every champion across the whole franchise, numbered seasons and spinoffs alike.