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As Nick Selby discusses his recent bout of frostbite — half of his right pinky finger is a deep black color — he’s fairly calm.
“My pinky might lose a little bit,” he casually tells PEOPLE, describing the process of auto-amputation, where the body naturally sheds tissue after blood flow has been severely compromised. “It’ll be fine in the long run.”
And to Selby, it was a worthy sacrifice to complete the lifelong goal of summiting Mount Everest.
“This whole Everest thing — I’ve always wanted to do it, but it seemed very unattainable for someone from Central Illinois,” he says.
Nick Selby
Growing up, Selby always had a love for hiking. His family took trips to Colorado to hit the trails, and when he was 13, he climbed his first ever mountain at a summer camp. And in 2023, he traveled to Everest Base Camp — a hiking area in Nepal at the base of the world’s tallest mountain — where he got his first sense about what it might take to summit the entire thing.
“I was like, ‘Oh, this is more attainable than I thought it would be, as long as I get some mountaineering skills,” says Selby. (As opposed to hiking, he explains, mountaineering can be best described as “extreme camping” — requiring technical skills in ice climbing and rock climbing, as well as the physical stamina to reach such high elevations.)
Over the next two years, he trained hard. Mostly, it looked like hours and hours on the StairMaster with between 50 and 75 pounds of weight in his backpack.
“It’s really tough, but it worked out in the end, and it really got me in shape,” says Selby.
Before Everest, he and some friends he had made in the mountaineering community also trekked up several other mountains in preparation, taking on Aconcagua in Argentina in 2023 and Manaslu in Nepal the next year.
Nick Selby
Though summiting those mountains is an incredible feat on its own, for Selby, whose eyes were set on Everest, “that was just a practice,” he tells PEOPLE. “It went fine for all of us, so in 2025 I climbed Mount Everest.”
To take on Everest, Selby and his group of over a dozen other trekkers first had to reach Everest Base Camp, which alone takes roughly two weeks. Once there, they did they did their first rotation, heading partially up the mountain before returning to base camp to rest. Then they were ready to start the actual climb — they just needed the conditions to clear up.
“Mount Everest is very windy most of the time — it gets very windy and very cold,” says Selby. “So we’re waiting for that window where it’s not that windy and not that cold.”
After about two weeks of waiting, the conditions appeared to be as good as they were going to get. On May 13, the group left base camp, starting the trek to the top, and five days later, at around 5:30 a.m., Selby and just over half of his group officially summited the tallest mountain in the world.
In a video he shared from the summit, Selby’s face was chapped and had turned a deep pink — but the snowcapped Himalayan mountains and the true blue sky beamed brightly all around him.
Nick Selby
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Still, Selby wasn’t in the clear: by that point, the mouth of his water bottle had frozen, leaving him very dehydrated for the hike back down. To make matters worse, his throat had become extremely dry from the bottled oxygen he was breathing, and he started to throw up because he was swallowing so much blood. And, he had started to notice signs of frostbite on his hand.
“I was really scared,” he admits.
The journey back to base camp took roughly two days, and once he arrived, he was taken in a helicopter to a hospital in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal, where he was treated for his dehydration and frostbite. Though the doctors initially couldn’t find any sign of oxygen in his pinky, after roughly 48 hours, they finally started to get a more promising reading.
Back in the United States, the color in Selby’s pinky slowly became darker and darker as his frostbite evolved. He started undergoing hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which pushes oxygen into damaged tissue in the hopes of healing it, though it’s still unclear how much of his pinky he’ll be able to save.
Still, Selby considers himself “very lucky” — his middle and ring fingers also had frostbite, both of which have almost entirely recovered.
As a result of his trip, he’s also grown his following on TikTok. When he left for Everest, Selby tells PEOPLE, he had roughly 50 followers — but after a pair of viral videos at the summit and of his pinky with frostbite, each of which was viewed tens of millions of times, he now has over 50,000 fans curious about his incredible journey.
Nick Selby
When asked if he has any more hikes in his future, Selby says he’s planning to “take it easy,” especially as his finger recovers. He has his eyes on Mount Whitney in California’s Sierra Nevada range — a much easier hike than Everest, especially during the summer when conditions are less harsh. And his followers keep asking him if he’s considering Mount Godwin-Austen, the world’s second-tallest mountain after Everest, but he says, “the answer is probably no.”
At this point, he wants to use his platform to demonstrate that summiting Mount Everest “is more attainable” for the average person “than anyone thinks,” he says, noting that he made the journey just two years after his first mountaineering experience.
“I’m someone who’s from the very flat state of Illinois, where I would look around and not even find a hill,” continues Selby. “It’s very possible for anyone to do it with a little determination and planning.”