Survival teacher Woniya Thibeault was asked about a nail salon. Instead, she won 'Alone.'

Woniya Thibeault, one of the toughest and bravest people on planet Earth you may not know, was once asked by a radio host why she wanted to go deep into the wilderness, where she eventually spent months in the Arctic with little food. The question time traveled from the 1950s.

Why do you want to go to the wilderness, the host asked, where there are no nail salons? Thibeault laughed the question off. But, amazingly, the host repeated it, just to make sure Thibeault heard it. She did and again dismissed it.

Thibeault, who is an ancestral skills and wilderness survival instructor, told Paste BN Sports how it's far from unusual to deal with this type of sexism and not just from some in the media, but also viewers of The History Channel’s "Alone" solo survival challenge. She spent weeks alone off the coast of Labrador, Canada, becoming the first woman to win the competition, and also setting a record for the most time in the wilderness across two seasons at 123 days.

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Nail salon? Thibeault was busy redefining what wilderness survival looks like. It's not just male. It's also woman. She remains one of the bright examples of strength and ferocity in that space.

She makes it clear that she hears from plenty of viewers and others who support her but the misogyny is definitely there. "I'd say the sexism has steadily lessened," she said, "but it's definitely still there. I got a lot of it in my first season. It's part of our culture."

"I'm trying to change that narrative," she said, "and I think being on the show helped do that."

What Woniya Thibeault (pronounced Whoa-Knee-Ya Tebow) did in her time on the show is simply remarkable.

She won "Alone" in 2021 but before that she competed in season six on the show in 2018 and was the runner-up. She constructed her shelter out of branches and used bow and arrows to snag food. Her diet, in part, consisted of squirrels and berries. She lost one-third of her body weight.

The dangers she faced were real and at times frightening. In an interview with NPR she described one stretch of several days in cyclone winds.

"The snow is not just horizontal, sometimes vertical, but from the ground up because I was on steep ocean cliffs, right-facing the Atlantic Ocean. And so the weather would hit those cliffs and shoot upward. So literally snow shooting up under my parka. It was unbelievable.

"And because those winds were so fierce, they were also driving my smoke back down my chimney. So the scariest thing about that storm was the fact that midway through it, I started experiencing obviously a lot of smoke inhalation from the smoke, but then this incredible, searing pain in my eyes. And it turned out, as I discovered later, that it was from having some seaweed burning in my fire. And the seaweed was saturated with salt, of course, which is sodium and chloride together. And when they burn, they separate. So it was actually chlorine gas."

She went temporarily blind and the emergency button had lost power and was dead. She of course made it through the storm and the series.

And by the way: there's no camera crew with the contestants. It's all self-filmed.

Thibeault has a new book, “NEVER ALONE: A Solo Arctic Survival Journey" that chronicles her life and her time on the show. The idea is a simple one: contestants are asked to survive for as long as possible with just 10 survival items they chose. The last person in the wilderness wins $500,000.

Thibeault said one of the things she wanted to do on "Alone" was make sure girls saw themselves on the screen.

"The reason we don't see more girls in the outdoors," she said, "is because we aren't pushed to go in the outdoors."

There was something Thibeault said to MSNBC recently about appearing on the show that was remarkably poignant.

"I made a real point of showing up as a woman, not as someone denying my femininity," she said. "Femininity isn’t a handicap, it's a strength. We have an idea in our culture that survival requires going out there and duking it out with nature, which is ridiculous. I'm not going to wrestle the Arctic into submission. I arrived and greeted the lake, letting it know who I was and my intentions. I believed the land would respond better to that than it would to someone who is clearly out to dominate it and take from it without asking."

She survived. She won. All without going to a nail salon.