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2nd December 2025
04:34pm GMT
YouTube legend Luke Nichols of the Outdoor Boys channel has come out of retirement and donated one of his videos to a friend whose wife is battling cancer.
In May 2025, Luke uploaded a video explaining that he was leaving YouTube in order to protect his family's privacy, following his skyrocketing fame to a channel with over 18 million followers.
His videos were mostly centred around outdoor survival in Alaska as well as other family holiday videos from around the world.
Luke did confirm in his goodbye video that he had already pre-recorded some videos that he would upload at the end of 2025.
Now, in an offer of kindness synonymous with this time of year, the survival youtuber has filmed a video and gifted it to a friend and fellow outdoor youtuber, Steven from MyLifeOutdoors.
Sadly, Steven's wife is currently battling cancer.
Luke filmed the video and gifted it to Steven's channel so that it could generate enough money to support the family over the Christmas period with the couple having four kids together.
Taking to Instagram, he wrote: "Some of you may know that Steven with the MyLifeOutdoors YouTube channel is helping his wife battle cancer while also raising four kids and running a YouTube channel.
"That's a lot to deal with, so I made a video for him to have and post exclusively on his channel so that he didn't have to worry about making a video over the holidays."
The new video has been posted to both channels using YouTube's new collaborate feature and sees Luke head to Alaska to survive in a snowstorm with minimal provisions.
The video description reads: "Racing against the early Arctic sunset, he builds a fire-heated shelter from scratch, gathers enough wood for a 17-hour night, cooks moose stew over the flames, and even squeezes in a bit of gear talk along the way."
This kind gesture comes just a month after Steven revealed that his wife had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer earlier this year.
In a post he said: "The lump turned out to be a completely different type of breast cancer. Triple negative breast cancer, which as far as I understand is the worst type of breast cancer that you can be diagnosed with.
“It has the least number of treatment options available to doctors to try to treat it.
“She’s going to be doing 22 weeks of chemotherapy of which we are already four weeks into.
“So far, she’s been tolerating the chemo really well. First few weeks went better than this last one.”
Steven thanked Luke for his gesture in a post on Instagram.
He wrote: "I’m incredibly honored and grateful for the support of my new friend Luke Nichols from outdoorboyschannel and so many others in the YouTube community.
"He came out of retirement and endured a cold night in the Alaskan Wilderness just to film a video on my behalf. I have yet to meet an Outdoor YouTuber who isn’t an incredible human being!
"Thank you Luke and thank you to everyone who watches, likes and subscribes. It means the world to me and my family."
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