Outdoor Boys, a Year and a Half After the Goodbye

Luke Nichols shut down Outdoor Boys in May 2025 with a farewell video, citing the attention his family was drawing as the channel grew. It had about 15 million subscribers at the time. It has more than 20 million now, without him posting regularly.

He kept one promise. In November 2025 he released three unfinished films he had already shot, one of them a float plane trip with his three sons into Twin Lakes in Lake Clark National Park. He was clear that this was not a return.

Since then the updates have been sparse and secondhand: a church advisory council appointment at the end of 2025, a photograph from a fishing shop in Japan that circulated widely among fans who took it as proof he was still doing the thing he liked, minus the camera.

In May he gave the commencement address at the George Mason law school where he earned his degree in 2009. He practised criminal defence in Virginia for a decade before the fishing videos overtook the day job, and he told the graduating class to save money, having gone out into the 2008 crash himself.

His teenage son Tom has meanwhile posted his own first solo bushcraft overnight in Alaska, building a shelter from downed wood and cooking his own meals, with an admission at the end that he still has a lot to learn.