Alan Kay teaches outdoor survival classes when he is home in Georgia.A man from Blairsville, Ga., is a finalist tonight on "Alone," the History Channel show that took men from across the country, dropped them in the middle of nowhere with 10 survival items and told them to stay alive as long as they could.
Alan Kay, 41, who has lived in the mountains of North Georgia since he was 16, is going up against Sam Larson from Lincoln, Neb., in the show's finale. One of them is walking away with $500,000.
On the phone Wednesday afternoon, Kay, who has a wife and four children, wouldn't say if he knows whether he won.
"We just have to wait and see," said Kay, a corrections officer for the Georgia Department of Corrections.
Last winter, Kay and Larson, along with eight other men, were left on Vancouver Island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, with nothing but their wilderness skills and items such as a saw, axe, sleeping bag, knife and water bottle.
Oh, and cameras, of course, so they could film themselves going through their survival trials since there were no camera crews with them. They also were given an SAT phone so they could call at any time and say "I need medical help" or just plain "Come get me."
Kay, who teaches outdoor survival classes in Georgia, said his biggest issues were dealing with the weather and the actual task of filming.
"The weather can get really gnarly," he said. "I think they get about 13 feet of rain a year up there. We talk in terms of inches, up there they may say, 'We're expecting a foot of rain.'"
Filming was difficult because it took so much energy to get the multiple shots that show officials wanted, he said. To cut down a tree, for instance, he'd have to set up the camera some distance away, get a shot, move the camera to get another angle, get some closeups of actually cutting the tree down, then move the camera away and drag the tree to it.
"It taxed you physically and mentally," he said. "It cost you more calories and physical energy than you would expend in a normal survival situation."
At 926 square miles and covered with heavy forest, Vancouver Island is home to bears, wolves and cougars. One of the contestants on "Alone," freaked out by nearby bears, left after one night. Kay, though, wasn't too worried about his animal neighbors because he was familiar with them.
"I had some wolves come to my camp on the third night, sniffing around," he recalls. "They were just checking out who was new in the neighborhood."
He also ran into a bear a time or two, but they "just looked at each other, nothing confrontational."
None of the men knew where the others were and none knew when anyone called for extraction. Kay said he never ran into any of the other men.
And, if you should ever be caught in an outdoor survival situation yourself, Kay has some advice:
' Keep yourself warm. Hypothermia is "what kills most people."
' Find a clean source of water and drink a lot. "Hydration is very important."
' Finally, stay calm and don't let fear or panic set in. "You have to be the master of your mind."
Contact Shawn Ryan at sryan@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6327.