In 2019, outdoor guide Kielyn Marrone was put to the test when she competed on the TV show Alone. On the show, contestants are dropped into remote places with only 10 pieces of equipment and challenged to survive in the wild. Kielyn finished third in her season, lasting a total of 80 days in a hand built shelter, cooking over a fire, and hunting and forging for food.
In 2019, outdoor guide Kielyn Marrone was put to the test when she competed on the TV show Alone. On the show, contestants are dropped into remote places with only 10 pieces of equipment and challenged to survive in the wild. Kielyn finished third in her season, lasting a total of 80 days in a hand built shelter, cooking over a fire, and hunting and forging for food.
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Shelby Stanger:
In 2019, outdoor guide Kielyn Marrone was put to the test when she competed on the TV show Alone. If you haven't seen Alone, it's one of the most extreme outdoor competition shows I've ever watched. Contestants are dropped into remote places with only 10 pieces of equipment and challenged to survive in the wild. Kielyn finished third in her season, lasting a total of 80 days in a hand built shelter, cooking over a fire, and hunting and forging for food.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-Op Studios production. Kielyn Marrone lives in northern Ontario, Canada, where she and her husband Dave have built an off-the-grid homestead. There, they hunt, trap and forage for most of their food. In addition to being their home base, the properties also the headquarters of their winter adventure company. Kielyn never guessed that her career as an outdoor guide would lead her to compete on a reality TV show. In fact, in her normal life, Kielyn doesn't watch much TV at all. For several years while she and Dave were building their own house on 40 acres of undeveloped land, they lived year round in a tent in northern Canada, even in the dead of winter.
How did you get the idea to even apply to be on Alone?
Kielyn Marrone:
Yeah, it's kind of a funny story. In our tent, we downloaded season four of Alone because our friend Jim Baird was on it and it was a couple's season, so it was Jim and his brother Ted from Ontario, and we were watching them and they won. And Dave got inspired, my husband, and he wanted to apply, and season five was like a redemption season, so he didn't qualify for that. He didn't get a callback for season six. And then for season seven, they were sort of doing a bit of digging, realized that he had a wife who was also into the outdoors. So they reached out to me and asked if I would apply. And at this point of our careers, we had been spinning our wheels and I was feeling pretty burnt out. Doing well, having good success, but also taking on a lot of debt and pressure to continue to grow the business.
And I found out that if you make it to bootcamp, you get flown to New York for 10 days of interviews and training. So I was like, "Damn, if we make it, we'll get a vacation." So I was like, "Sign me up." And I put very little effort into my profile video. We had just come off a really busy winter season and right after our season, we have to cut all our firewood for the next year. So we were busy cutting firewood and I just was tired and was just like, "Oh, whatever, probably going to lead to nothing." And we both made it to bootcamp, so it's like the top 20 people get flown to New York. So we got our little mini vacation.
And as the process was going along, I started believing that this opportunity was right for me. And much to Dave's chagrin, I won over him. And they couldn't choose both of us because, well, one, we had a company to run, and two, the producer thought that that would just be weird. Like a husband and wife kind of against each other. So yeah, it's a bit of a sore spot for us.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, he seems, I'm sure he's so proud of you. You crushed it.
Kielyn Marrone:
Yeah, he's super, super proud. And now we can laugh about it, but it honestly was, if I went back again, it would be completely different because I felt so guilty for taking his spot. And like you say, well, I didn't take his spot because it may not have been his to take in the first place, but I definitely had a huge weight on my shoulders to do well because if I didn't do well, I wasted that chance for both of us. And that put a lot of pressure on me, which negatively impacted my experience, but also pushed me to go further.
Shelby Stanger:
In fall of 2019, Kielyn and her fellow competitors were dropped off in different locations around Great Slave Lake, which is the second-largest lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada. The temperatures hovered around 40 degrees during the day and got down into the 20s at night. With the exception of visits from crew members who swapped out recording equipment and did medical checks, the contestants were completely isolated. They spent the days hunting, foraging, making fire, and building or repairing their shelter. Their time in the wilderness ended either when the contestants chose to tap out or when they failed a medical check. What did you eat? What was your shelter? How did you get water?
Kielyn Marrone:
I ate every single day, which was amazing. I caught over 40 rabbits, so it was a half a rabbit a day. I had tons of mushrooms that I had harvested and dehydrated, and I had tons of berries that I also dehydrated, and then I drank the water straight from the lake. It is extremely deep and extremely cold. And so I decided I would save a lot of energy having to boil all of my water if I just drank it straight. And so I was like, "Well, you got to risk it for the biscuit", and if I was going to get sick, I was going to get sick right away, and if I wasn't going to get sick, then yay for me.
Shelby Stanger:
And what was your shelter?
Kielyn Marrone:
It was like a log cabin style. It was an A-frame, and then I filled the front and the back with logs and the sides and then packed on the bows to insulate it.
Shelby Stanger:
Did you feel less alone because there were cameras there? Knowing that you had a camera and that you could call for help?
Kielyn Marrone:
Yes and no. I definitely liked the camera to talk to because I did feel like it was my friend. It was like Wilson from Castaway.
Shelby Stanger:
I was going to say Wilson in Castaway.
Kielyn Marrone:
Totally. It totally was. When you're out in the wilderness, actually alone, you're not talking. You're silent. All of your thoughts, all of the things that you're doing are in your head. But production wouldn't have a TV show if you did that. A couple of times or once I had feedback of like, "Okay, you're really good at talking to the camera when you're just having a conversation. But when you're doing something like building your shelter or making your ax handle, you kind of say what you're going to do and then you just do it." Whereas they want you to talk about what you're doing, which was a bit challenging.
Shelby Stanger:
So would they call you and tell you to improve what you're saying?
Kielyn Marrone:
Every 10 to 20 days they would come to your land to exchange your memory cards, give you fresh batteries, and do a health checkup, and that's when they would give you the feedback about your footage, because they would've watched the previous 10 days' footage.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you have a story that you love telling people about that was amazing? Maybe when you caught a fish or I don't know.
Kielyn Marrone:
When I caught the fish, yes, that was probably the best moment of my life.
Shelby Stanger:
Let's talk about that. Take us to that moment when you finally caught a fish. What day was it? How hungry were you? What was your mental state like?
Kielyn Marrone:
Yeah. Well, it's a long story because there's 56 days of buildup. So it was on day 56 when I caught my first fish. Fish has quite a lot of fat proportionately compared to other small game. So fish is life out there. Besides big game, if you were going to be able to sustain yourself, fish would definitely be your top priority. And I knew that going in, and so I brought a gill net. I brought a hook and line, but my whole shoreline was shallow and super boulder-y. My hooks would get caught in rocks and the fish just weren't coming up.
So I really tried constantly for fishing and had to stay adaptable and so I started snaring snowshoe hare, and that was working really well for me. I ended up having 270 snares set over my land, but I was still losing fat off my body at a rate that was not going to be sustainable. And as the days progressed, the ice was starting to freeze over. So I was just waiting for that day when I could get out onto the ice, and I managed to be able to get out onto the ice by day 50, and it took six days of just all day spending hours out on the freezing cold lake to catch my first fish. And I just knew that if I didn't catch the fish that my time was going to be up.
So catching that first fish, there's this thing that happened to me where you're playing it cool on the outside, but you don't realize that there's all of this tension that's building because you're just trying to hold it together because you know the pressure that you're under, you know the stress your body's going through and you're just keeping it together, staying positive, staying adaptable and staying hopeful.
And so when I caught that fish and pulled it out of the water, it just was this giant floodgate opening of emotion, and that was just me letting that stress just release and it just felt like, I don't even know what came out of my mouth, but it was like just ecstasy. My whole body was crying. It was just like this huge relief. And that's often when I would cry, was when something gave me a little bit of tension release.
Shelby Stanger:
I think that's why we loved you so much on the show, because we're like, "Oh my God". Everybody's cheering for you because you cried.
Kielyn Marrone:
I think that may be one of the reasons why I got picked was because in the final interview with the executive producers of the show, they asked the question, "So, why? Why do you want to be on the show?" And I just welled up and just started crying in front of them, and it was just like, "I'm tired. I need a break from the business and the property. I'm just tired." And I started crying and they're like, "Check, will show emotion in front of others."
And I have someone or everybody, my mom especially, they always called me a very emotional person. And to me that was always seen as a negative part of my character that you're emotional, that means that's bad. And through Alone and showing that vulnerability and showing the ups and the downs, I could reevaluate this whole concept of emotion equals bad. Some of my family were like, "Oh, they misrepresented you because they showed you weak. That made you look weak and meek." And I was just like, "I think you're missing the point. I'm fine. First of all, I'm fine with showing that I'm crying because I did cry. I cried a lot, and I'm not going to deny that because it was effing hard."
Shelby Stanger:
Competing on Alone is an extreme challenge, but Kielyn did really well. Like she said, she was able to get food to eat every day. She built a solid shelter and she knew what she needed to do to survive. When Kielyn started the show, her goal was to last 60 days. In the end, she ended up making it 80 days in the wild. She eventually tapped out because she was literally starving. She had lost a ton of weight and her extremities were starting to go numb. It was clear that if she stayed, she was going to suffer irreparable damage to her hands and feet.
When we come back, Kielyn shares how she got through some of the hardest moments. She tells us about her off-grid home and talks about her guiding company called Lure of the North.
Kielyn Marrone and her husband live off grid in Northern Ontario where they run an outdoor expedition company Lure of the North. In 2020, kielyn made it to the final three on the TV show Alone, which follows contestants as they try to survive in the wilderness. Even though Kielyn was really successful on the show, it was still one of the most challenging things she's ever done. It wasn't just wilderness skills that she needed. Kielyn also relied on mental fortitude to keep her going when conditions were difficult.
I just want to know mindset. What are some things you said to yourself to keep going or things that you've leaned on?
Kielyn Marrone:
Yeah, there's so many things. One of the biggest ones for me is trying to look at your situation objectively. Because if you've ever given your friend advice, you hear their problem and then you're like, "Oh, you should really just work on this and do this and that", and you've got all these answers for this person. But when you think of your own issues, what's going on is so much more complicated because you're like, "Well, it's not just black and white."
So what I try to do is remove myself from the situation and try and look at my situation objectively instead of subjectively. And I find that that's really helpful to clear your emotions from the situation. And then another thing is to figure out, you're going to have to ask yourself, is it up to me or is it not up to me? Is it in my control or is it not in my control? And there's so many things that people fret over and worry about that are just simply not in their hands. Bad weather, politics, how someone reacts to you and your circumstance, that is so not in your control. And if you just focus on the things that are in your control, then you have immediately less to worry about. So yeah, both of those things are super simple but not easy.
Shelby Stanger:
So was there a time on that show where you use that strategy of looking at something objectively?
Kielyn Marrone:
Let me think. Well, yeah. One perfect example was I was being so hard on myself because I had missed out on a moose a couple of times. Either I didn't have my bow or it spooked off. The timing wasn't right. And so I was just killing myself for not getting the moose like, "You're stupid. Why didn't you have your bow?" Or "You're a terrible hunter." And then it's like this out of body kind of removing yourself and you're just looking at yourself and you've got 30 days worth of mushrooms, 30 days worth of berries, and I'm staring at six or seven snowshoe hares right next to me. I was like, "Kielyn, you have so much food. Just because you don't have a moose does not mean you're a failure. It just means you failed at that. But look at all of your other successes. You're doing just fine. In fact, you're doing more than fine. You're doing amazing." And that was really helpful for me to just be like, "Snap out of it. You're doing fine."
Shelby Stanger:
After the show, Kielyn went back home to Ontario. It took her body a while to recover. In addition to losing a bunch of weight, her hair thinned and she noticed her legs in particular were extremely fatigued. When Kielyn and I spoke, she said that three and a half years later, she's only now starting to feel normal again. Kielyn was happy to return to her regular life, which is actually still pretty isolated and wild. She and her husband Dave, live on 40 acres in rural Ontario, and they're pursuing their dream of living off the land.
I want to kind of switch gears and talk about your life. You've built this house off grid. For those who don't know what it is to live off grid, could you just tell me a little bit about what it's like and how you built it and why you decided to do it?
Kielyn Marrone:
For sure. I kind of already knew that I wanted to have property and build our home and just be surrounded by nature. I was definitely never a city girl, but we were broke-ass students with zero money, so we couldn't afford it. But we started looking, our house, we were newly married and we still had two roommates just to help pay for the mortgage. So we were like newlyweds, have two student roommates and trying to run a guiding company out of a 900 square foot house. We were kind of running out of space and our business was growing well, and we decided we needed to walk the talk. And if we're going to be a wilderness guiding company, we needed to live in the wilderness. We started looking and everything was out of our price range, and we were just sort of like, "Well, maybe we could refinance the house and get some money out." And we were looking into business loans and stuff like that.
And then finally we came across a property after a couple of years and it said 40 acres of paradise, and there was two really pixelated photos, one of the pond and one of the lake that it was connected to. And then it was just GPS coordinates and it was like 40 acres for $40,000, and it was just empty land. And we're like, "This is in our budget and we love that it's remote." And so it took us two tries to find it, first of all, because of all of the winding trails. So basically we went to the nearest road, and then we just had our GPS and our compass, and we were due north of the property and we just walked straight south until we hit it, and we were just crashing through the forest, wading through chest deep swamp, and it was quite the adventure to find it.
And as soon as we got there, it opened up to this beautiful pond and there was this nice bald rock. We just got naked and sun dried on the rock. And so we called the owner and we were like, "Okay, we love it, but how do you get there? Because surely there's an easier way to get there." And so that's when he took us in by boat. And then we moved here, and now we live in a beautiful home. We've got 18 solar panels. We collect, all of our water is rainwater. We have a wood-fired sauna, a wood-fired hot tub now even, and just living the life of luxury. I don't know, it feels like we're off grid, but it's starting to feel pretty cushy around here. We still don't have insulation in our house walls yet, but we'll get there.
Shelby Stanger:
So what do you do for food?
Kielyn Marrone:
We do trap beavers. So we are responsible for the crown trap line that surrounds our property, and we manage, I think it's 50,000 acres that we manage, and we have a quota for 30 beavers every year, and we skin them. We render their fat to make soap and lard, and then we eat the meat. So we've got a freezer full of beaver meat, and that makes up about 90% of our meat for the year. So we actually don't do a lot of big game hunting because our freezer's full of beaver and it tastes amazing. A lot of people ask what it tastes like, it tastes like beef.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow, I had no idea. And you make soap from the fat. How badass are you?
Kielyn Marrone:
It's pretty awesome. It's the most hydrating soap I've ever used.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm always just really impressed by the self-sufficiency and simplicity. It's simple, but it's a lot of work to do what you do.
Kielyn Marrone:
Yeah, totally. It's a lot of work. And also I feel like I'm a little bit of a poser because I mean, you're saying, "Oh, you're so badass", and I'm just like, "Well, I could definitely be doing a lot more."
Shelby Stanger:
Kielyn and her husband Dave also own a guiding company called Lure of the North. Their expeditions balance modern outdoor technology with equipment and techniques originally used by indigenous Canadians. Instead of backpacks and Gore-Tex, Lure of the North uses toboggans and breathable materials like cotton canvas, wool and fur. Kielyn and Dave teach workshops, sell gear and lead trips that take people out into the Arctic Wilderness of Ontario.
Do you ever take people that are complete rookies like me on a two or three day expedition?
Kielyn Marrone:
A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, we have an intro trip. It's seven days, and we believe that that is a hundred percent doable for everybody. We do three days of training here at our base camp, and then we go out for four days.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, cool. And what happens? How does it change them?
Kielyn Marrone:
The winter trips are super empowering as an individual and as a community because it's a self equalizing system. So one person might be really good at hauling a huge load, but one person might be less strong. So the closer you are to the front of the train, so everyone walks in a single file, the person up front is breaking the snow for the person behind them. So as the train goes down, it gets easier and easier for the people. So you can have a group with just wide range of skill levels, but it all works out in the wash because you can just position people in the line accordingly.
And if one person's like, "Oh, my toboggan feels really heavy", and then someone will be like, "Well, I can take more. Mine feels light." So then they'll just move gear to their toboggan or vice versa. And it can change from day to day too. Everyone has their up days and their down days, and so if you're having a down day, you just shift the weight a little bit. Yeah, it's super empowering for people to feel like they've accomplished something and also be a part of a team.
Shelby Stanger:
Personally, I'm kind of a wimp when it comes to cold weather, but the trips that Kielyn leads sound pretty life-changing. Many of the participants come away feeling a greater sense of confidence, courage, and a desire to get closer to nature. They even heard from one woman who after her expedition, pursued a dream of buying her own homestead. If you want to learn more about Lure of the North and maybe even go on an expedition yourself, check them out at lureofthenorth.com.
Kielyn Marrone, thank you so much for coming on Wild Ideas Worth Living and sharing so many behind the scenes stories from your time on Alone. If you want to learn more about Kielyn, check out Lure of the North on Instagram @LureoftheNorth, and head on over to the History Channel to check out Kielyn on season seven of Alone.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. And our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby.
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