Vincent "Vince" Richards Lee (November 7, 1938 – April 17, 2024) was an American writer who served as a Marine Corps officer, founder and chief instructor of his own mountaineering school, western residential architect, Andean explorer, scholar of megalithic monuments, avocational Southwest archaeologist, and author of several books on those subjects.

[1] Lee attended North Tarrytown High School, then selected Princeton University and entered its Regular Naval ROTC program during 1956–60, incurring a three-year obligation for military service.

[citation needed] Lee served with the 3rd Marine Division on Okinawa, and on deployments in the Western Pacific, Philippines, South Korea and Japan.

[2] In the same publication, the chief instructor at the center, Orlo K. Steele, a subsequent Marine 2-star General, placed him in its "list of superb mountain leaders".

[citation needed] In the interval between his Marine Corp discharge and the start of graduate school at Princeton, Lee began an association with the Outward Bound program.

While maintaining his architectural practice in Jackson Hole, he developed the Asheville School program into what became 'High Country West (HCW), Wilderness Expeditions', with several three-week sessions each summer for the next 23 years.

[6] He taught climbing skills to hundreds of beginning climbers, leading parties to nearly 500 peaks in the Rockies, Canada and overseas.

As advertised in the local newspaper, HCW's expeditions offered 30-day trips varying in degree of difficulty from "mellow outing" to "strenuous".

His activities caught the attention of Wyoming's Republican governor, Stan Hathaway, who appointed him to the state's then new Air Quality Advisory Board.

An early Peace Corps volunteer in the high Andes of Peru and also an Outward Bound instructor in both Minnesota and British Columbia.

[citation needed] On his 1979 HCW expedition into Colombia's Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Lee fell 'under the spell of the Andes' as he wrote in Old School, (Ch 13).

A month among the indigenous Kogi Indians sparked his long-dormant interest in pre-Columbian societies and his architect's fascination with buildings and construction led inevitably to yet another "career", this time in Andean archaeology.

The strange crag overlooked the extensive but unmapped ruins at nearby Espíritu Pampa (the Plain of Ghosts), visited years earlier by both Savoy and Hiram Bingham, the 'discoverer' of Machu Picchu.

Named Icma Colla (the Widowed Queen) or as Savoy spells it Iccma Ccolla, it was a sacred Inca landmark according to the local Indians.

Kim MacQuarrie, author of The Last Days of the Incas, devotes much of his final chapter and epilog to Vince and Nancy Lee's place in the story of Vilcabamba.

Lee investigated techniques of design and construction that enabled ancient societies to quarry, move and erect enormous stone structures.

His findings, analyses, and reconstructions are documented in his book Ancient Moonshots, where he discusses those techniques[25] and his self-published collection of monographs on the subject, Building Big.