Lee Petersen – Setter & Head Coach
Lee started climbing in 1992 at the Red River Gorge in Kentucky and soon found his second home and job at the local climbing gym in Cincinnati. He spent much of his teens and twenties living a climbing bum lifestyle in Minnesota, Wyoming, and New Hampshire. He’s now been competing, setting, guiding, or coaching climbing in various forms for the last 27 years. Lee has been setting at Ascension Rock Club since day one and coaching the youth competitive climbing team for the last 5 years. The combination of travel, people, and the feeling of movement on the wall or rock is what he finds most wholesome about climbing. Pursuing a Ph.D. in physics brought him to Fairbanks, although he now spends most of his time exploring and photographing Alaska when not at the gym.
