ŽIGA OGORELEC | Science of Survival
ABOUT ME
International competition abroad — Alone: World Championship (Season 13)
In 2025, I was selected as one of ten survivalists from around the world to compete on Alone: World Championship (Season 13), airing on The History Channel. The season was filmed in the Richardson Mountains of Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories, roughly 200 km north of the Arctic Circle — grizzly, wolf and moose country, with winter closing in fast. Contestants are dropped alone, with no crew, no support and only ten self-selected items, and have to build shelter, find food and water, and document the entire experience themselves on camera.
For me, Alone is the natural extension of years spent testing survival skills the hard way — and a chance to represent the kind of central European bushcraft tradition I grew up with, on a genuinely international stage.
(Results are under embargo until March 2027 — I can’t share how it went just yet, but you can follow the season as it airs.)
One year, a bicycle, around the world
In 2015, I spent a year cycling around the world — 5 continents, 34 countries, roughly 19,000 km — with no prior touring or long-distance cycling experience. Just a bicycle, a tent, and no fixed plan beyond the next border. It took me through deserts, mountains, jungles and places well off the tourist track, and threw me into cultures and situations I had no roadmap for. It’s also where a lot of my improvisational approach to survival and travel took shape — you learn fast when there’s no one to bail you out.
Survival background & Gozdovništvo
Survival wasn’t something I picked up for a TV show — it’s been part of my life since I was a teenager. I grew up in Kočevje, in the wildest, most bear-populated part of Slovenia, and started testing myself in the forest there long before I had any scientific language for what I was doing. Together with my brother Miha, I pushed through increasingly demanding challenges over the years: winter treks without food, knife-only excursions, multi-day expeditions with almost nothing. My longest solo test was 15 days and 270 km through Slovenia’s wildest terrain, living entirely off what I could forage, fish and trap.
In 2014, Miha and I turned that experience into something we could teach, founding Gozdovništvo – Bushcraft & Survival School Slovenia (gozdovnistvo.si), together with fellow instructors Jurij and Andrej. It remains active in Slovenia, especially through the summer season, even as my own focus shifts toward Sweden from 2027 onwards.
Scientific background
Alongside all of this, I built a career in science. I earned my PhD in Germany and continued my research in Ljubljana, working in limnology and ichthyology (the study of freshwater ecosystems and fish). That academic training shapes how I think about survival too: bioenergetics, ecological carrying capacity, food web dynamics, and human physiology aren’t abstract concepts to me; they’re things I can actually observe out there. I don’t see these two sides of my life as separate. One taught me how to test things rigorously; the other gave me an unusually direct way to test them.
Talks & presentations
I’ve spoken about survival, bushcraft and the science behind it at international events, including the Global Bushcraft Symposium and Rabbitstick, which is among the longest-running primitive skills gatherings in the world. These are always a chance to compare notes with instructors and practitioners from very different traditions, and to bring some of that back into how I teach and think about this field.