Nikki van Schyndel
Author and Professional Survialist
Nikki wears superhero belt buckles, stalks grizzly bears for fun and is excited to inspire the world by becoming the new face of survival.
ABOUT
Nikki van Schyndel has always done what scares her the most and this has led her on unbelievable adventures in the wild.
With 20 years of training and study, Nikki van Schyndel is one of North America’s top wilderness survivalists. Though not your stereotypical “end-of- the-world” survivalist, she has studied and taught under the best earth skills educators in North America and has dedicated her life to her naturalist studies.
After quitting law school to become a sponsored snowboarder, Nikki was recruited in 2018 to star in History Channel’s popular television series Alone; the toughest, self-filming, survival show ever produced.
Nikki tested her skills by spending a year and a half surviving in the wilderness, using primitive ways of the past, trapping and spearing bears, fishing with bone hooks, and hunting with stone-tipped arrows. She recounts the adventure in her best-selling memoir, Becoming Wild. She once cuddled with a wild mountain lion for the night, which she retells on the TEDx stage.
Nikki has been featured in “Off-Grid” documentaries, National Geographic’s Living Free and various publications, including Canadian Geographic and GQ India for her successful, wilderness guiding operation.
Today, having finally found the balance between the ancient and the new, Nikki lives off-the-grid on an island in the middle of nowhere, in a log cabin she built herself from a how-to-book and her “how hard can it be” motto. A float plane delivers mail once a week to her tiny, coastal community of Echo Bay, B.C. Population 8.
Nikki wears superhero belt buckles, stalks grizzly bears for fun and is excited to inspire the world by becoming the new face of survival.