Eagle Climbing and Fitness breaks ground, scheduled to open in fall 2018
Randy Wyrick|randy@vaildaily.com |
EAGLE — Three Eagle men stopped dreaming about climbing and started building their climbing dream.
Dave Dantas, Rick Patriacca and Larry Moore are partnering on Eagle Climbing and Fitness, and broke ground Monday afternoon, Nov. 20.
Each brings their unique expertise to the project.
Patriacca and Dantas have been building together for years and have kicked around all sorts of ideas.
“We considered a hardware store and countless other ideas,” Patriacca said.
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They finally landed on this project.
Moore has been coaching world-class climbers for decades and has led climbers from the Vail Athletic Club’s youth program to the nationals for several years. Moore used to live and coach in Denver and started dreaming of something like this almost 20 years ago.
He landed in Eagle County seven years ago and brought the dream with him.
Moore was wandering around with a local real estate agent who showed him the Chambers Avenue site in Eagle.
That afternoon in downtown Eagle, Moore ran into Dantas. Moore was still all wound up about the possibilities of his climbing gym/yoga studio/fitness center on that property. Dantas, it turned out, owns the land.
“It’s a small town,” Dantas said, smiling, during Monday’s groundbreaking.
Their conversation turned from theory to practicality in a shorter expanse of time than anything this side of a theoretical physics experiment.
They’re excited about the project and its part in the region’s climbing community.
“There’s a big social component to it,” Dantas said. “It will be great for kids in the community.”
Coming To Fruition
Moore said Dantas’ son started when he was 5 years old and has been to the nationals five times. Moore has been coaching climbing at the Vail Athletic Club for 14 years and has taken competitors to the USA Climbing nationals during most of those years.
Along with local and regional events, the plan for Eagle Climbing and Fitness is to host World Cup climbing events, USA Climbing events, host the high school series and, as Moore, Dantas and Patriacca all said, “build strength in the community,” which is both physical and spiritual.
They hope to open by fall 2018.
“It’s exciting to see this come to fruition,” Eagle Mayor Anne McKibbin said.
This building will have six commercial spaces, six apartments and a world-class climbing and fitness facility.
In the extremely near future, Patriacca and Dantas will start on two more similar projects for a total of eight more commercial spaces and eight more live/work apartments on Eagle’s Chambers Avenue.
Staff Writer Randy Wyrick can be reached at 970-748-2935 and rwyrick@vaildaily.com.
