Nicole Apelian

Count the items on Nicole Apelian's list that keep working while she rests: a gill net, trapping wire, and a fishing kit, three passive protein systems out of ten slots, with no bow anywhere. For an ethnobotanist managing multiple sclerosis through a long-form endurance format, that allocation is not conservative, it is precise. Energy is the scarcest resource in her version of this game, and every food method she packed accumulates calories without demanding them first.

Two attribution caveats belong in the open: her knife is reported elsewhere as a Ron Macy kukri and her multitool as a Leatherman Charge TTi, but neither attribution was independently confirmed in this site's research pass, so both stay flagged as reported rather than verified. The remaining items, saw, sleeping bag, ferro rod, pot, and rations, carry no recorded brands at all. She came into this all-returnee season with a full prior run on the show already behind her, and this list reads like its refinement.