Copyright Salt Lake City Deseret News
As promised, “Outdoor Boys” dropped a new video on YouTube over the weekend. In the new 30-minute episode, a float plane drops Luke Nichols and his three boys off in Alaska’s remote wilderness for three days of fishing, hiking and rafting at Twin Lakes in Lake Clark National Park. The video posted Saturday morning. As of Monday, it had more than 7.5 million views and 551,000 likes. It’s the first of three new videos Nichols plans to release in November. But that doesn’t mean “Outdoor Boys” is back since he shut down the channel in May. At the time, he said he had a lot of half-finished videos, including travel adventures and extreme camping trips he had been planning. If he decided to finish them, he said he would post them in one big dump at the end of the year. “I’ve got three videos for you. Ah, and they’re nice ones, too,” Nichols said in a brief video, announcing the limited return engagement. “So, for at least three weeks, Saturday morning ”Outdoor Boys" videos are back on the menu." He plans to post the next two Nov. 14 and Nov. 21. Is “Outdoor Boys” back? As for a permanent comeback since pulling the plug on the wildly popular program that had amassed 17.5 million subscribers, don’t hold your breath. “Does this mean I’m back and posting videos again? Nope. Just doing exactly what I told you I was going to do,” Nichols said in the video. “And will I post any more videos after that? I don’t know.” Nichols goes on to say he doesn’t regret his decision to say goodbye. “And I’m happy the way things are,” he said. Why did “Outdoor Boys” shut down? In May, Nichols announced that after 11 years on YouTube, including the first year as “Catfish and Carp,” and 1,100 videos, he was shutting down the channel. He cited the unwanted attention the program brought to him and his family as the audience grew. “The sheer volume of fans trying to contact me, trying to take pictures with me or just trying to come up and talk to me in public can be a bit overwhelming at times,” Nichols said. His videos often included his three boys — Tom, Nathan and Jacob — and his wife Rebecca. Nichols noted in May that his channel had gained 12 million subscribers in just the past 18 months. And because of people “stealing” his content and posting it on other platforms, he and his family have been viewed 4 billion times. That’s in addition to the 2.8 billion on YouTube. “My wife and I, we both have real concerns about what this will do to our family if I keep growing my YouTube channel at this pace. And the time to stop is before this problem gets so out of hand that my family and I can’t live normal lives,” he said in May.
