Nick Heil
Posted by Love Hope Strength on May 19, 2009
My yen for adventure took hold in the rugged suburbs of northern Virginia, not far from the nation’s capitol, where I (mis)spent most of my youth. One night, while stuck alone on the beltway in gridlock traffic at 2 a.m., I had a revelation: It was time to light out for bigger adventures and more wide-open spaces. After graduating with a degree in Art and English from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, I migrated to western Montana, where I completed a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Montana. It was an excellent way to justify the real reasons I went there: To ski,climb, bike, hike, and fish. Writing and wild places have defined my life ever since.
I’ve had the great fortune to visit some amazing places in my capacity as a freelance journalist, from the Caribbean to the Himalayas. In 2005, I travelled across Nepal with the Himalayan Cataract Project, participating in rural surgical field camps to help cure cataract blindness. I returned to the Himalayas a couple of years later to work on my first book, Dark Summit: the True Story of Everest’s Most Controversial Season, published in 2008 by Henry Holt, and winner of the Banff Mountain Book Festival Mountain Literature Award. My work has also appeared in Outside, Men’s Journal, Skiing, and other publications.
When I’m not traveling on larger assignments, I’m usually investigating some unusual aspect of human physiology in my role as Outside magazine’s Lab Rat—a monthly column that takes an irreverent look at health-and-fitness trends. I come from a medical family; my grandfather was a physician (back when they still made house calls) and my mother is a nurse, and I consider myself lucky to have been raised in a household that always embraced this world with a combination of silliness and deep seriousness. My mother is a two-time breast-cancer survivor—a fact that we all credit to early detection. I don’t know too many people whose lives haven’t been touched by cancer in one way or another, but we all seem to share a similar reaction: fear, initially, yes—but that’s soon replaced by an equally powerful realization that we’re all just visitors here for a precious short time. Suddenly, what we make of that time becomes infused with bright, new meaning.
I currently reside in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in an old adobe house, with my dog, Minnie, a rottie-shepherd mix who, actually, is not small at all but rather large.
