Dave Alie: BACKPACKING, CLIMBING

Age: 29 | Vitals: 6’3″, 185 lbs. | Current Residence: Denver, Colorado

My childhood home of Newton, Massachusetts, is hardly a proving ground for the outdoors, but it was close enough to the beautiful scenery of the rest of New England to get me started. As a kid, I spent plenty of hot summer weekends on various day-hikes around neighboring states. As a high school student, I was looking to expand my hiking interest to include easy technical climbs and scrambles on various peaks around the state. To this end, I learned the basics of rope management and traditional gear placement and explored easy technical terrain whenever I had the chance.

Years later and out of college, my wanderlust took me on a handful of backpacking and climbing tours that spanned Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South East Asia and, more locally, the Pacific Crest Trail and the Cascades before eventually depositing me in Denver, my current home.

Dave Alie on Skeletonic (5.11d R), Wall St., Moab, Utah.

Colorado has been an amazing place for me as a climber, with no shortage of classic lines to climb or footsteps to follow in. For reasons of convenience, I climb in Clear Creek and Eldorado Canyon most regularly, with Rocky Mountain National Park, Shelf Road, Vedauwoo, TenSleep, and the Utah desert coming in close behind. While my time is roughly evenly split between clipping bolts and placing gear (and I love both), larger alpine objectives and all the challenges that come with them are always my favorite trips.

As a grad student in engineering at DU, I spend my rest days doing materials research for renewable energy applications.

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