Alone in the Arctic: Prince George's Aaron Barnard is surviving

He's representing Canada on the TV series Alone: World Championship

As the lone Canadian contestant in the current reality TV series Alone, Aaron Barnard has had to lean on the backcountry survival instincts he was raised with growing up in Prince George. Having grown up on a hobby farm along Chief Lake Road northwest of the city, Barnard was born into a family of outdoors people. At an early age his parents, Julie and Dale, taught him and his two older brothers the skills of hunting, fishing, camping, building shelters, food gathering, fire-starting and how to cope with extreme weather and the real threat of animal predators.

So when he learned a year ago he’d been selected as one of the 10 contestants for Season 13 of the History Channel series, he had just 2 1/2 months to prepare trying to be the last person standing after months of living harsh climate of the Mackenzie River Delta in the Northwest Territories. The pressure was on. “I’m not a guy that wants to be on TV, I just thought I’d be good at it,” said Barnard, who spent the first four years of his life in Haida Gwaii.

“I’m sure many people from our community would be decent at it because that’s how we grew up. The majority of people in northern British Columbia have either hunted, fished, camped, grew up in the bush, worked traplines, that’s kind of how we’re raised and how we are.

This is kind of who we are, we’re all hardworking outdoors men and women and I kind of have to be good, I don’t have a choice.” The premise of the popular show is to last longer living alone and exposed to the elements than any of the other nine contestants and the winner gets $500,000 US. Each is equipped with a satellite phone and can tap out of the competition at any time with a phone call to the Alone base.

What makes the show unique and highly popular with viewers is its authenticity; each contestant is left to fend for themselves. Participants are allowed to bring just 10 personal items apart from clothing, which is also restricted. Barnard chose as his 10 items a sleeping bag, bow and arrow (with nine arrows), ferro rod to spark fires, multitool, cooking pot, fishing line and hooks, snare wire, paracord, axe and saw.

The show’s producers require at least eight hours of video each day from each contestant, who are given a handheld camera on a tripod as well as two action cameras that can be attached to their bodies. The camera kits are well-stocked with spare batteries that get refreshed during wellness checks. Doctor visits monitor overall health as the season progresses and contestants can be forced to end their attempts to be the Alone champion if they aren’t getting enough food, possibly leading to organ failure, or if they develop an illness or sustain an injury that could become life-threatening.

Medical staff watch for extreme changes in body-mass index, heart palpitations, frostbite, parasitic infections, exhaustion, food poisoning and intestinal problems that could jeopardize a full recovery. Billed as the Alone World Championship, Season 13 of Alone also includes four Americans, and one from Slovenia, Wales, Portugal, New Zealand and Australia. Nine are male.

Jaclyn (Jacks) Geneca, a 40-year-old film editor from New York City, is the lone female contestant. Two of the men, 31-year-old David Young of Spokane, Wash., and 54-year-old Dave Booth of Palmer, Alaska, tapped out early. Young left on the third day because he missed his family and Booth was done after four days when he left his ferro rod for sparking tinder too close to his campfire and it caught fire and was destroyed.

The Season 13 location is a half-hour boat ride from the hamlet of Aklavik, N.W.T., a 123-kilometre drive southwest of Inuvik. The Beaufort Sea is about 50 km away and the ocean influence often brings wet weather. The area is under snow eight months of the year, with winter temperatures as cold as -40s C.

The lack of dry combustibles and tight annual growth patterns of the spruce trees that are predominant in the area make it difficult to start fires in the boggy area. Surrounded by lakes and smaller rivers, the soft ground and fallen timber make walking difficult and energy-consuming. Having grown up in the Hart area of Prince George, which is surrounded by forest, Barnard is used to black flies, gnats and mosquitoes but not the swarms he’s encountering on Alone.

The Alone site is about 200 km north of the Arctic circle where daylight around the time of the winter solstice lasts only about an hour. Nestled in the foothills of the Richardson Mountains, the land is part of the migratory path for moose and cariboo, an area also frequented by grizzly bears, wolves and Dall sheep. Contestants were flown in for a 10-day orientation camp where they learn how to operate cameras and make use of bear bangers, bear mace and airhorns.

Being so close to the Arctic Ocean, although rare, there have been polar bears spotted in the area. Barnard said the the possibility of a bear encounter was his dad’s biggest fear when he told him he’d been selected for Alone. The Alone camp where medical staff, helicopters and boats are based is a 45-minute trip away.

“There’s nobody to save you,” said Barnard. “They promised us they’d be able to get to us in 45 minutes, so you’ve got to think if you’re attacked by a bear on choking (on a fish bone), you’re dead.” In one of the opening segments, Barnard is walking along a river bank when he senses movement in the bushes ahead of him and laments the fact he doesn’t have the binoculars he usually carries on a hunting trip.

He immediately suspects a bear or wolf until he comes across the telltale tail markings of a beaver left on the shore heading into the water. Still uncertain, he walks up the bank to get out of sight in case there is predator approaching. The contestants were each dropped at previously-selected sites chosen for their survivability, where food is more plentiful and shelter can be more easily constructed.

All 10 contestants are in the same general area but each site is different and they never see each other. The drop-off date was Sept. 8, 2025 at a time when berries were abundant but the supply diminished sharply within a week or so. Barnard used a tarp-covered lean-to the first two days to keep the bugs off and by the third day (Episode 2) he started building a more permanent log-cabin-style shelter with six-to-eight-foot lengths of logs stacked on one side sloping down to a lower side, with six skinnier poles forming the roof.

“People don’t believe in building log cabins, they think it’s too high of a calorie burn, but I was expecting to be there for a long time and I wanted something nice,” said Barnard. “I wanted something that was heavy-duty, well-insulated and that was my plan going in. I planned on building something sturdy.”

On the show he mentions what he considers his top three best survivor skills: hunting, mental toughness and bushcraft, all attributes passed down to him from his dad Dale and grandfather Les Barnard. They taught Barnard and his brothers, Greg and Brad, how to survive and thrive in backcountry settings, teaching them how to ice fish, how to process big-game animals and how to shoot a rifle (or a bow), even in foul weather. “We had 10 acres (on the family farm) and we grew up with pigs and chickens and every weekend we were camping fishing or hunting — they’d just kick us out of the house to go play outside,” he said.

“So me and my brothers would explore the bushes and we were outside most of my childhood.” Barnard has an athletic background and got into sports at a young age. He achieved a high level of fitness practicing martial arts and was an MMA fighter with six fights on his record from 2007-13.

The Kelly Road Secondary School graduate still plays hockey in the Prince George Rec League rec league as a centre for the Pacific Western Brewing Penguins and he plays rugby as a flanker for the Prince George Gnats. Barnard practiced his archery skills for months in the lead-up to the show and shot between 150-200 arrows every day and was feeling confident in his accuracy. But he became frustrated in Episode 2 while trying to kill his first squirrel.

It took him four arrows to hit the moving target and that squirrel was key because he used most of it to bait his fishing line he left anchored to the shore of a nearby river. Eventually he pulled his line out and discovered a 40-inch pike attached to it. “We just caught Moby Dick, holy crap, what a fish,” said an excited Barnard, knowing he’d be eating his first Alone meal, and a tasty one at that.

“Thank you squirrel. My first fish, I can breathe a sigh of relief and eat.” Moose tracks are not far from his camp he’s always on the lookout with his bow but it remains to be seen if he’s able to spot one within arrow range.

“I knew one of my biggest chances would be moose hunting because I’m from the north, I’ve hunted moose all my life, so I figured I would try to train as much as I could with my bow because if I acquired a moose I could be there a very long time,” he said. In his daily routine, from September to November he’s out hunting every day he’s not on the job. Barnard works in the oilfield as a plumber/gasfitter/pipefitter.

He spent a year and a half in Whitehorse but had never been as far north as the Alone site. He first applied to be an Alone contestant six years ago and two years later was contacted to answer a detailed list of questions. When he found out he was on the list for Season 13 he quit his job to focus on getting ready, testing out new gear and finding the best clothing options.

He purposely gained 50 pounds in that time, feasting on high-calorie foods to add to his six-foot, 190-pound frame, knowing fat is a scarce commodity in the woods and the weight would burn off. “I was still active but you can hear it in the first couple of episodes, I was fat-breathing almost, I was in rough shape,” said Barnard. “Your body’s not used to that and doesn’t like it but it’s also needed.

You’re going to burn a lot of calories trying to hunt and acquire food. “You learn about yourself and what your shortcomings are, there are so many lessons out there and you can’t go inside to warm up if it’s cool or get water out of the tap. You’ve got to get it and boil it.

There’s no easy steps when you’re living in the bush.” As the title suggests, the mental/emotional stress of being alone and missing family members is one of the primary reasons contestants tap out. Women, on average, last 49 days, 12 days longer than the 37-day average for men, but there has never been a female Alone winner in 12 seasons.

Woniya Thibault came close. She spent 73 days in the Arctic as the runner-up in Season 6 in 2018. Five year later she won the spinoff series, Alone: Frozen, after surviving 50 days in Labrador.

Ghina Chick was the inaugural Alone: Australia series winner after lasting 67 days in Tasmania. In Episode 4, which first aired on July 8, the first snowfall of the season comes Day 13 of Barnard's epic survival test and leaves a light dusting in the high country near his camp, a late-September warning of colder things to come. "Snow in the mountains, it's coming, no waiting around now," says Barnard.

"If you're not set up for winter you're not going to last. This is my advantage. This is Canada, this is cold.

Cold is going to destroy people with hypothermia. December, here we come." He says the onset of snow will start to bring moose down from the mountains and they prepare for rutting and that will get them moving, hopefully close to his camp.

He uses two-inch diameter branches lashed together to form a square and stacks then on top of each other tieing the layers together with paracord to make the frame of a chimney for his shelter, then covers it with mud which will form a hard shell when heat is applied. He talks about winning the competition and the half-million dollar prize. "Four months of my life would set me up for life," he said.

During Episode 4, Poldi, a 24-year-old from New Zealand is seen making a teepee-style shelter out of evergreen boughs, but loses his drive to finish his shelter. Drained of his energy he used his satellite phone to call base camp and becomes the third contestant to drop out, leaving seven still there in their camps. In Episode 5, which aired on July 15, it's Day 15 for Barnard and he talks about his friend and mixed-martial arts coach, Travis Galbraith, who drowned on his 43rd birthday, May 18, 2024, while using a raft to navigate Willow River into an area where he and Barnard had hunted together.

He applied to be a contestant years before Galbraith died and promised him if he got on the show he'd never quit. "He said anything that's worth doing is going to be hard.' Barnard says he's feeling good emotionally and locked in mentally, all he needs is to get a moose and he'll be be good to last hundreds of days.

It's the key to him winning and he's seen calling for one. "I'm kind of worried about the food, I'm not going to lie," he said. He sets up a remote camera while walking along the river which later reveals a lynx following his tracks and that encourages him to set up a trap line with multiple braided wire snares, set on the faint trail where the lynx has walked.

Barnard knows how the show turned out and who walked away with a life-changing payday but is sworn to secrecy. Like the rest of the viewers he’s seeing each episode for the first time. “It’s obviously a bit nerve-wracking because I know what happened out there, but you never know how they’re going to edit the show to portray you,” said Barnard.

“Mistakes are made in the bush and there’s obviously lots of mistakes and lots of triumphs and you don’t know which ones are going to make it to the screen.” Season 13 of Alone premiered on June 17 on History Channel and a new episode runs each week. For as long as Barnard remains part of the show, a weekly watch party will be happening every Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Black Clover pub downtown.