Peter Heller is a longtime contributor to NPR, a contributing editor at Outside Magazine and National Geographic Adventure, and appears frequently in Men’s Journal. He is an award winning adventure travel writer and the author of three books of literary nonfiction. He lives in Denver.

Heller was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended high school and college in Vermont and New Hampshire where he became an outdoorsman and whitewater kayaker. He traveled the world as an expedition kayaker, writing about challenging descents in the Pamirs, the Tien Shan mountains, the Caucuses, Central America and Peru.