The 35 Best Survivor Challenges Ever

survivorteaser — Photo: Monty Brinton/CBS (2); CBS

From deep underwater to high up on four-story platforms, Survivor has put its contestants through over 800 insane challenges through the years. Before season 35—Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers—we asked challenge producer John Kirhoffer (who has been with the show since the very first episode) to pick his 35 favorite challenges ever. But he did more than that. He also shared the stories behind the competitions—and gave us a special tease for a challenge coming up! Ahead, check out Kirhoffer's best challenges ever list that encompasses the show's first 35 seasons (in chronological order, by season) and all the insider intel that comes with it.

1. Quest for Fire, Survivor: Borneo (Season 1)

"The original, first Survivor challenge ever! Tribes work together carrying one lit torch, and race from the ocean to the land, lighting, I believe, 20 fires, and finish by lighting a wok high up on a 'Burning Man.' I was soooooo nervous, as our pyrotechnic prowess had not yet been perfected. It was barely considered actually, and it was the cause of much of my anxiety. With something like 40 little fires to light, we didn't have propane or waterproof flame technology. We had kerosene rags in cans, a sunset start (very time sensitive), and as Jeff proclaimed in iconic fashion at the start of the challenge, 'A storm is approaching, waterproof matches and immunity at stake... Go!' We could see rain clouds surrounding us and coming in from the horizon—the enemy of fire challenges! My extra prayers that day paid off, the challenge went on to be a classic, and we learned a valuable lesson: Always have a backup challenge ready on days scheduled for fire challenges!"

2. In From the Deep, Survivor: Borneo (Season 1)

"This is merely an element in a challenge today. But back in the very beginning, it was the entire challenge. Where the tribe swims out into fairly deep water and takes turns diving down to move a very heavy chest along the floor of the ocean. When they run out of breath, they swim to the surface to get air and rest. In that first season, we had no Dream Team. The producers, myself, and even Jeff and Mark Burnett would test these challenges. For this one, I was on Mark's team, and I consider myself a strong water guy. On 'Go,' we swim out, Mark and I go down together and grab the chest and begin moving it towards shore. As I run out of breath, I go to the surface. Mark pops up after me and looks at me in shock, 'John! What happened?' 'I ran out of breath,' I replied, to which Mark responded, 'What?!?! Don't be a wussy, we need to win this thing!' From that point on, my head would have turned six different colors and exploded rather than me surfacing before Mark for the rest of that challenge! And yes... we won!"

3. Rescue Mission, Survivor: Borneo (Season 1)

"A player from each team was hanging from trees in the jungle by parachutes. And the rest of the tribe races through the jungle with a stretcher, retrieves them from the tree, places them on the stretcher, and races back to the start. It is memorable for me because we were thinking that former Navy SEAL Rudy is 72 years old. It may be a bit overly aggressive, so we should have a less physical spot for a 'caller.' When informed of this position, Rudy said in his classic style, 'Well, we better give that spot to a woman,' and he went on to race through the jungle and rescue his tribemate!"

4. Hand on a Hard Idol, Survivor: Borneo (Season 1)

Richard Hatch, Kelly Wiglesworth, and Rudy Boesch on 'Survivor: Borneo'. MONTY BRINTON/CBS

"This is the original, quintessential, endurance challenge where the final three players stand on a block and keep one hand on a totem pole. As Jeff Probst says, 'This challenge was the perfect final immunity challenge.' It provoked a stunning revelation from Richard Hatch that would have changed the game—and possibly the course of Survivor—if only Rudy had been able to hang on."

5. Butch Cassidy, Survivor: Australia (Season 2)

"What makes a great home... or challenge? Location, location, location. This was one of those epic challenge spots that we created the challenge around the location. Tribes gathered at the top of a very tall cliff, one at a time players leaped off into the water below, swam downstream, and raced across the beach to their reward. I remember it was early in my relationship with Mark Burnett, and I was concerned that one of our contestants, Roger, was a weak swimmer. I suggested to Mark that we could have Roger wear a wetsuit under his clothing for floatation, and Mark looked at me in shock at the thought: 'Absolutely not,' Mark said. 'He has a tribe of strong, fit people. They can work it out, have a stronger swimmer jump in first and wait for him to give assistance if needed!' That philosophy has been what has kept Survivor pure."

6. Rock-n-Roll (a.k.a. The Boulder Dash), Survivor: Africa (Season 3)

"Soooo iconic in such an epic season. This is the one where the tribe rolled huge rebar and fiberglass boulders across the African Savanna. We originally called it 'The Boulder Dash,' and someone in production was concerned that the board game Balderdash might have an issue with the name, so we changed it. I can see how the similarities could confuse people!"

7. When It Rains, It Pours, Survivor: Africa (Season 3)

"Here is a true Survivor classic, where players are situated under a tall structure with a large bucket of colored water overhead. The players' hands are extended up, tied to a rope, which is attached to the bucket. When their arm fatigues and lowers, even just half an inch, the water cascades down onto their heads."

8. Rock Bottom, Survivor: Marquesas (Season 4)

PROBST LEITNER VAVRICK-O'BRIEN ENGLISH — MONTY BRINTON/CBS

"In this contest, players dove from a platform to retrieve shells and rocks from the floor of the ocean. This challenge—as well as 'In from the Deep'—were both inspired from a surfer training regime in the classic film called In God's Hands."

9. Pilfering Pirates, Survivor: Thailand (Season 5)

HUENG ZBACNIK ROGERS — MONTY BRINTON/CBS

"This was our first ever, head-to-head, physical battle challenge. Players raced across floating balance beams to collect a series of baskets from the opposing tribe's boat and bring it to theirs. When they met at a common intersection, they would grapple to knock an opponent into the water. Lots of choking, cheating, and battling! It set the tone for future physical challenges."

10. Breathing Room, Survivor: Thailand (Season 5)

"Players are stuck under a steel cage during a rising tide. When they run out of breathing room, they bail out of the challenge by swimming out from under it. This classic is one of my absolute favorites but requires perfect shallow lagoon settings to make it happen. This is where staying calm in a stressful situation really pays off."

11. Jail Break, Survivor: Thailand (Season 5)

ROGERS GLOVER GENTRY — MONTY BRINTON/CBS

"This was inspired by all the old cowboy movies I'd watch as a kid. Seeing a prisoner tying sticks together to reach out and grab a key. Like so many others, this was once the entire challenge, and now it is a segment to a bigger picture."

12. Keel Hauling, Survivor: Pearl Islands (Season 7)

"When we came up with the pirate theme for Pearl Islands, the creative floodgates opened. So fun! It meant I could read pirate books and watch lots of pirate movies and call it work! In this particular competition, players race across a long floating platform, and then jump in the water, and pull themselves under water back to the beginning using a rope. In one book, they spoke of the punishment called 'keelhauling' where they punished a criminal by dragging them under the barnacle-infested keel of the boat as torture. Mark wouldn't let me use barnacles!"

13. Face Off (a.k.a. Touchy Subjects), Survivor: All-Stars (Season 8)

"This classic challenge of social politics forced players to answer a series of questions using only the names of their current tribemates. First, they would answer a questionnaire asking, 'Who on your tribe is under the false impression that they are smart?' or 'Who on your tribe does not deserve to be called an all-star?' All loaded questions, because whether you believe the question truly doesn't apply to anyone, you have to select one name. Then you had to guess whom the majority of the tribe chose for the answer. This challenge was designed to hurt players' feelings and get them feisty, and Alicia took the bait—and the lion's share of the abuse—and exploded in anger and frustration back at camp!"

14. Get a Grip, Survivor: Vanuatu (Season 9)

"Players wrap themselves around a tall pole and cling on for as long as they can until gravity and exhaustion bring them to the ground. For a large part of the early days, our production designer/producer Dan Munday was the fire in the challenges' engine, responsible for the creation of many classics on this list. I remember vividly wanting, needing, to come up with a compelling, fun, fair immunity challenge before Dan did, and while I was sitting on a log, watching local guys climbing coconut trees in Vanuatu, it hit me!"

15. Supply Dump, Survivor: Palau (Season 10)

"Perhaps not the most memorable of our opening immunity challenges for some. But it is for me. In this season, Mark Burnett wanted to stress the consequences of bad decisions very vividly. So in this opening obstacle course, the tribes would reach stations where the group had to make decisions to take or leave cumbersome, essential survival supplies to carry along the course with them. They only got to keep the supplies if they won, and could only win immunity if they were the fastest. It worked perfectly as spontaneous arguments erupted, fingers were pointed, and a bad decision cost the first player voted out a potential million bucks. We have played with this decision-making dilemma many times since."

16. Anchor Management, Survivor: Panama — Exile Island (Season 12)

"There is one reason, and one reason only that this challenge is on my list of favorites. It's when Jeff instructs the tribes to transport 'A GIANT ZOMBIE HEAD from the ocean to the beach!' This was our Exile Island season and we were going for a spooky, horror movie kind of theme—shrunken heads, a huge driftwood skull on Exile Island—so zombies seemed to fit in. So whenever someone pitches a crazy idea that makes no apparent sense, we can say, 'You will retrieve a giant zombie head…"

17. Smash and Grab, Survivor: Cook Islands (Season 13)

"This is another classic water challenge element. Often when creating challenges I say to the guys, 'What would a bunch of 12-year-old kids want to do for fun in this environment?' One answer is always true: Jump from a high platform into water! And smashing a tile to retrieve a key, forcing the player to dive down, in crystal clear water, adds to the fun!"

18. Kicking and Screaming, Survivor: Cook Islands (Season 13)

"I will never forget the morning of this challenge's inception. I was out surfing with Dan Munday, and he paddled up next to me and said, 'Hey, mate, what if we had poles buried in the ground, and one player from each team has to hug onto it for dear life, as two players from the other tribe battle to pull them off the pole, and drag them across a finish line?' Just then a wave came through, Dan caught it and surfed away... I sat there thinking: Genius! He's done it again! I loved it. We knew it was a future classic while we were testing it with the Dream Team!"

19. Crate Idea, Survivor: Tocantins (Season 18)

Survivor: Tocantins - The Brazilian Highlands — Monty Brinton/CBS

"One of our mantras that Jeff established years ago is, Simple in concept, difficult in execution. My friend, and regular challenge consultant, Myles Nye took this mantra to heart and had a 'Crate Idea.' Players race out and roll massive, heavy boxes across a field, then stack them to form a staircase, with a puzzle design on all sides! You see that one pop up every few seasons."

20. Simmotion, Survivor: Tocantins (Season 18)

"This is maybe the most perfect immunity challenge we have ever done. This is the challenge where the players drop billiard balls into a downward spiraling series of tracks and catch them at the bottom. Named after its creator, our art director, Simon Ross."

21. Battle Dig, Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains (Season 20)

"This is a classic battle challenge, made iconic on day one of the legendary Heroes vs. Villains season. Within moments of landing on the shores of Samoa in military helicopters, the tribes faced off in pairs to find, dig up, and race back bundles to their tribe mat. Along the way, the other tribe would tackle, wrestle, battle to get the bundle and get it to their own mat. In one short challenge, Rupert broke a toe, Stephanie dislocated her shoulder, Coach rode Colby like a small pony, and Sandra removed Sugar's top—yet undeterred Sugar scored, flashed the crowd and 'saluted' her foe using only two fingers!"

22. Spit It Out, Survivor: Nicaragua (Season 21)

"This has to be the winner of the challenge causing me the most anxiety ever. We built these massive, three-bladed windmills. A tribemate is attached to each blade, and the rest of the tribe turns the blades clockwise, through a huge tank of water below. When the player is upside-down and submerged, they grab a mouthful of water, then when they are spun upright, they spit the water into a bucket. When the bucket is filled with water, the water tips, releasing puzzle pieces. So fun to watch, so stressful to produce!"

23. Gulliver's Travels, Survivor: Nicaragua (Season 21)

"I love this challenge. Another in the school of, let's watch the tribes work together to carry an extremely big, heavy, and awkward prop through an obstacle course! We were helping to promote the movie Gulliver's Travels, and each tribe carried a 10-foot tall, 400-pound stuffed Gulliver. What made this even more meaningful for us was that for some reason, we weren't legally allowed to replicate Jack Black's face, so the faces of the two Gullivers were based from two different bearded superheroes:our production designer Dax and scenic artist Burny!"

24. Teeter Tower, Survivor: South Pacific (Season 23)

"In this challenge, players stacked cards with one hand while balancing with the other. We had another, very large water challenge idea, 'Bird on a Wire,' slated for our penultimate immunity challenge, but after exhaustive testing and tweaking, we just couldn't make it immunity worthy… or safe enough! So with only a couple days to go, we walked through our graveyard of previously used challenges to see what elements we could use for inspiration… and Teeter Tower was born."

25. Losing Face, Survivor: South Pacific (Season 23)

"As so many are, this one was inspired by watching local people in everyday life. I saw some Samoan guys racing around the coconut grove picking up coconuts in a wheelbarrow and I had just watched the Transformers movie. It's the one where they race to assemble a wheelbarrow, then race to a variety of stations in a field to collect coconuts, then dump the coconuts in a bin at the end, then disassemble the wheelbarrow and RE-assemble it, Transformers-style, to become a slingshot. The tribe would then race to fire coconuts at five large wooden masks. And it lived up to its hype! Before this challenge started, Jeff told the players that I had already predicted this would be 'the greatest challenge ever!' Thanks, no pressure, Jeff! The challenge itself was great, as were the tribe and social dynamics between Ozzy and Cochran, as well as Coach and Michaela—and the shootout at the end with Jim Rice on a hot streak to come from behind and win!"

26. Operation Balance Build, Survivor: One World (Season 24)

"This is the challenge where you thread the saucers through the wire structure using a long fork while balancing on a wobbly beam. This is also the challenge where I bonded with Christopher (Millhouse) Marchand as a creative partnership. It was his first season and we needed a killer final immunity challenge and we were struggling. So we had the first of our now traditional 'cigar and wine' meetings—after work, of course. Only a couple glasses into it, we came up with a new classic!"

27. Long Way to the Top, Survivor: Caramoan (Season 26)

"This is the first immunity challenge of the season where players race to the top of a four-story structure and throw off fragile crates filled with sandbags, shattering upon impact. When all of the crates have been smashed, other players use the sandbags inside to toss into a series of targets. As you know, Dalton, I am a huge classic rock fan. This challenge was inspired as I was reading a Rolling Stone article about the notorious antics of bands like Led Zeppelin and the Who throwing TVs from their hotel room windows to see them smash below!"

28. Vertigo, Survivor: Cagayan (Season 28)

"In this one, players stand atop a tall, narrow pole in the ocean and throw down a bucket attached to a rope and pull up water, then pour it into a tube to raise a key. They then leap off the pole into the ocean, swim to shore, and unlock puzzle pieces and solve the puzzle. This was the Loved Ones challenge in Cagayan, and Kass was out of it—scared to death up on that tall pole. It felt like she would never get enough water to retrieve the key. The other players had been working on their puzzle for quite a while by the time Kass got her key. And in one of our biggest come-from-behind victories ever, she quickly solved one of our most difficult puzzles ever to win the challenge! Great example of how often you NEVER GIVE UP on Survivor... or in life!"

29. Austin's EOC, Survivor: San Juan del Sur (Season 29)

"This is the one created by our friend Austin Russell. It is called the Elemental Obstacle Course. Austin came to location in Nicaragua as a visit from the Make-A-Wish program. Austin and his family attended several rehearsals and shoots, then they stopped by my office and he pitched me a few challenges, and this one popped! It's the one where teams race from a mat, crash through a massive pile of hay, scoop water in a bucket, carry it up and over a huge teeter-totter, pour it into a trough until a gate drops, then race to solve a very large Survivor puzzle. Austin still remains a close friend and a legit member of our Survivor family."

30. Final Fortitude, Survivor: Worlds Apart (Season 30)

"I loved this season. Great location, great characters, and great stories. Blue Collar Mike found himself behind the 8-ball all alone without an alliance early into the individual portion of the game, and he had to fight to win every challenge, or find idols, to stay alive in the game. And with his grit and faith, he made it to this final four challenge where they had to race up a very tall staircase, grab a bag of puzzle pieces and launch themselves over a wall, careening down the biggest waterslide we have ever done! Mike pulled it out, and the final four had a genuine, beautiful bonding moment as Mike went on to win the season."

31. This Much, Survivor: Kaoh Rong (Season 32)

"This is one of my favorite new-school endurance challenges. Players stand on a platform and outstretch their arms as far as they can, applying pressure to a pair of wooden discs. When they fatigue, the disc drops and they lose. Again, looks so easy and is so excruciating! I loved the battle of good vs. (sort of) evil with Aubry against Jason in Kaoh Rong—where Jason won and saved himself once again."

32. A Bit Tipsy, Survivor: Kaoh Rong (Season 32)

"In this challenge, players balance a very wobbly table with a long rope, while walking back and forth collecting, placing, and eventually stacking. Dan Munday had left the show a few years earlier, and his role as 'idea generator' in the challenge team was replaced by Christopher (Millhouse) Marchand. This was one of the first big ideas from Millhouse that opened the floodgates of many innovations to come!"

33. Slither Me Timbers, Survivor: Millennials vs Gen X (Season 33)

"Players are bound by their arms and legs and slither on their bellies through the sand. I LOVE this challenge! And as a sneak peek, I'll tease that an epic new version of this may just be coming up in the very near future!"

34. Serpent Turf, Survivor: Game Changers (Season 34)

The Stakes Have Been Raised — Timothy Kuratek/CBS

"I love this one so much! It's the one where the tribes race out into the ocean, climb up and over a tall cage wall, and retrieve a massive 30-foot-long, 400-pound canvas snake, return it to the beach, remove five number discs to release metal rings, then toss the rings onto eight paddles to spell IMMUNITY. The showdown between Malcolm and JT was darn good, but not as epic as the rehearsal with the press where Team Dalton just narrowly beat Team Scott Porter!" (Editor's note: I still have nightmares about getting that submerged snake out of the cage. It has become my personal Vietnam.)