Timber Cleghorn is a contestant on Season 11 of Alone on the HISTORY Channel.
(Courtesy: Brendan Ko George / The HISTORY Channel)
A show that brands itself as the “ultimate test of human will” has a competitor from southern Indiana this season.
Timothy “Timber” Cleghorn is a humanitarian aid worker who lives in Salem and grew up in southern Indiana. From growing up away from modern society to living in active conflict zones, he feels his life experience and survival knowledge make him the right type of person for the History Channel’s survival show, Alone.
Instead of viewing the experience as a challenge, he said he used his time on the show as a healing journey.
What’s Alone?
Cleghorn is one of 10 contestants trying to be the last one standing to win a $500,000 prize.
To do so, contestants will need to rely on their wits and skills to endure the frigid winter climate of the Arctic Circle. This season is the northernmost location the show has ever gone.
But there’s one exception; they have to film everything themselves.
“So there's a box of camera gear — like a 65-pound box of camera gear, five cameras — and you've got to run all those.”
It’s part of the show’s authenticity, which Cleghorn confirmed is all real. There’s no production team hiding in the bushes. If a contestant gets hurt, it takes about an hour for the medical team to get to the person’s camp site. The only human interaction they have is a medical check every three weeks.
The Season 11 Alone contestants. (Courtesy: Brendan Ko George / The HISTORY Channel)
When he was first dropped off at the Mackenzie River Delta last year, Cleghorn said the cameras took some getting used to.
“During those first few weeks, I definitely felt intense pressure from those cameras. And eventually, the cameras kind of just became my friends.”
The show serves as a testament to the human spirit, Cleghorn said.
“Alone is a show about what happens to a person, when they're completely isolated from anything of our modern world,” he said. “It's one person dropped in the middle of the wilderness.”
Timber’s journey
Cleghorn discovered the show a few years ago through a friend, who told him he would be great on the show.
“I went and watched one season. Season six, I believe. And I refused to watch anymore after that,” he said. “Because I'm like, if I can't do this, I'm not watching it. It bothers me to watch other people doing what I love to do.”
He decided to apply for the show inbetween aid projects.
“I look over on the couch one day and my kids have turned on Alone, and in that moment, I decided that's what I need to do while I'm stateside.”
Cleghorn’s love for the outdoors came from his childhood, where he grew and hunted his own food. He and his family had no phones, electricity or running water.
“I can also remember leaving home at 19 years old and not even knowing how to order food at McDonald's,” he said. “I stood at McDonald's looking at the menu and I'm like, ‘what is this?’ I hadn't ever done it before. And so, that was a unique perspective — to be more familiar with how to butcher a chicken than how to order a fried chicken.”
That familiarity with southern Indiana nature would come in handy during the first few muddy weeks, but he said the winter climate was a new kind of cold he hadn’t endured yet.
“Living here in southern Indiana helped me out with knowing how to handle things when everything is kind of mucky,” he said. “And that's the only way in which the Indiana climate translates at all to the Arctic.”
In his show biography, he says he got into humanitarian aid on a summer trip helping orphanages in Ukraine.
Since then, he and his family have worked closely with the Pamiri tribe in Afghanistan to study their unwritten languages and create reading material for their dialects. They’ve also assisted refugees escaping the Taliban’s takeover in 2021 with rehousing, medical care and counseling.
Cleghorn takes a picture with children during his time providing aid near the Afghanistan border. (Courtesy: Timber Cleghorn)
Cleghorn saw Alone as an opportunity to get away from the chaos.
“One of my big motivating factors to get on Alone was just the stress built up inside me,” he said.
“I remember coming back to the states last time, when a hunter would shoot in the woods I would dive on the floor with my kids. Even my son, he saw a combine picking soybeans in a field out here not far from Salem, and he screamed, ‘a tank!’ and threw himself in the floorboard of the car. And that just killed me, you know? And I'm like, yeah, there is PTSD built up inside us. And I said, ‘maybe being on Alone will really help that.’”
He said he didn’t feel the “drop shock” that other contestants say they experience when they start the show.
“I’ve felt drop shock so many times before in war zones,” he said. “I remember walking into Ukraine two years ago, and the invasion was brand new. And I thought Russia will take this whole country in a week or two, and we'll all be dead, you know? But I walked in anyway and I felt the most intense drop shock, if you can think of it that way.”
Cleghorn watches every episode as it airs with his family.
“My two little boys love the show,” he said. “They love survival and it's one of their favorite shows. My wife really likes it, and so it's a neat experience.”
You can watch Timber during his journey on season 11 — new episodes air Thursday nights at 8 through August on the HISTORY Channel, with episodes available for streaming the next day.
