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It is that kind of raw moxie that landed the 24-year-old free-lance photographer, who grew up partly in Juneau and now lives in Newport Beach, Calif., on a South Pacific island competing for $1 million on CBS's reality television show "Survivor: Marqueses."

Jones was voted off the island after 12 of the 39 days that two teams compete until only one person is left. Her dismissal aired Wednesday though she left the island when the show was taped last fall.

"I was with my roommate one night and we saw a cockroach run across the room," Jones told the Empire on Thursday. "I knew she had picked up an application for the show and so I asked her, 'Do you think you could eat one of those?' "

It's a particularly useful quality to posses because contestants often are asked to ingest all manner of critter at the behest of the show's producers.

Jones' roommate quickly tore up her application but Jones picked one up.

Jones said she and her friends created a video they hoped might catch a network exec's eye over thousands of other would-be contestants.

"I didn't like my video at all," she said. "It was mostly me sitting there saying why I should be picked. And then I pulled down my pants to show where my roommate had painted 'pick me' in silver paint on my butt."

Next thing Jones knew she was on her way to Los Angeles for an interview.

Her father, Larry Jones, said she was cloistered with 50 other finalists in a hotel for a week and subjected to a battery of psychological and physical tests and interviews.

"It was so difficult because the whole time I was interviewing, and before I left, I could only let people who needed to know that I was going know where I was going," she said. "So I told my roommate, my family and my boyfriend. But for everyone else I had to lie and lie and lie. Suddenly, I had all these doctors' appointments and things that I had to tell people I was going to. It was really hard."

Yes, Jones did say boyfriend. Anyone who watches the show saw the riveting raft romance between Jones and teammate Rob Mariano. But Jones said all wasn't as it appeared.

"We had a connection, but I wouldn't say we got romantic," Jones said. "We laughed at the same jokes, we had the same thoughts about the people on the island and we worked really well together. There was a little kiss, but nothing more than that."

Jones said she isn't letting the way she was portrayed on the show affect her, either. Many of the scenes with Jones depicted her in a barely-there bikini, often sunning herself while others worked.

"I know I did more work than they showed and I got a bad rap for running around the whole time in a bikini," she said. "But the fact is, everyone there was wearing a bikini. But, for whatever reason, people picked up on it with me. All I have to say was it was like 100 degrees every day and I was in the water all the time - like I'm going to wear long sleeves."

Jones said each castaway was allowed to bring only the bare essentials in a knapsack, including one pair of socks, shorts, pants, underwear, a bathing suit, a long-sleeved shirt and a short-sleeved shirt.

"My clothes smelled really bad when I came back," she said. "So not packing a lot kind of came in handy. I halfway wanted to just throw the whole thing away when I came back."

Though she wasn't ready to throw in the towel, Jones said she was glad to come back home when the time came.

"You don't even realize the mental, emotional and physical toll an experience like this takes on you," she said. "Mentally you have to be one step ahead and thinking of strategy all the time. Every second, you are thinking of strategy. You never get a rest and it's exhausting. You are not sleeping. You're not eating. You have to constantly mentally convince yourself you're not hungry so you don't think about how hungry you are.

"I don't regret anything though," Jones said. "I did what I went there to do, which was compete and have fun and meet new people. I would do it again in a heartbeat."

Melanie Plenda can be reached at mplenda@juneauempire.com.