Anna Daniels
Often, when challenges end in disaster on Survivor, the elements have as much to do with it as the challenge itself. The show’s 11th season, Survivor: Guatemala, began with a grueling 11 mile overnight race through the dense rainforest, with the winning tribe getting a superior camp as their reward. With temperatures over 100 degrees and humidity that probably felt akin to hiking through a sauna, the trek would have been extreme even at a leisurely pace. In the end, the Nakum tribe won, but the race left multiple tribe members vomiting and passing out from dehydration and exhaustion. One even found himself poisoned by a thorny plant that pricked him during the hike.
Similar hot and humid conditions led to an incident that host Jeff Probst described as “the most frightened” he’s ever been during filming (via Entertainment Weekly). In the fourth episode of the series’ 32nd season, Survivor: Koah Rong, contestants faced a challenge that required them to dig up bags of balls that were hidden on the beach. Searching for the bags took nearly an hour of grueling work, and when the challenge was finished, multiple contestants collapsed from heat stroke and required medical attention. One contestant, 27 year old Caleb Reynolds, had to be medically evacuated from the game after his heart rate plummeted and it appeared to the medical team that he was at risk of dying.
Both of those contests ended in calamity, but neither were as dangerous as the one that the show’s longtime challenge designer refused to run after back-to-back seasons of fearing for the lives of the contestants.
Written by: Looper
