Dean Potter and a wingsuit flying partner have died after a BASE jump in Yosemite National Park went badly wrong. The two men are believed to have flown from Glacier Point.
More details will be provided as they become available.

Potter, 43, was one of the most innovative, energizing, and controversial figures in modern climbing. He broke barriers in speed and solo climbing, including repeatedly setting the speed record for the Nose of El Capitan, climbing with Timmy O'Neill or the late Sean "Stanley" Leary. In 2001, he and O'Neill became the first climbers to link Yosemite's three biggest walls—Half Dome, Mt. Watkins, and El Capitan—in a single day. He also speed-soloed Half Dome and El Capitan in a day. In Patagonia, among many other bold climbs, he free-soloed Supercanaleta on Fitz Roy and later did the first ascent of California Roulette, also free solo, on Fitz Roy.

Potter also became famous for bold high-line walks and BASE jumping, and he combined these skills with climbing in an invented sport: FreeBASE, in which he wore a parachute for protection in case he fell from a solo climb. Using this technique he free-soloed the long 5.12+ route Deep Blue Sea on a limestone pillar on the right side of the Eiger north face.

In 2006, his solo ascent of Delicate Arch in Arches National Park caused a storm of controversy and led to the loss of his sponsorship from Patagonia. More recently, the film When Dogs Fly featured Potter's tandem wingsuit flights with his Queensland heeler, Whisper, an activity that left some viewers in awe and others in anger.

Standing 6 feet 5 inches tall, but always speaking softly, Potter was a larger-than-life figure who fully lived up to the much-overused term "extreme sports athlete."

Free spirit and free soloist Dean Potter, 43, died yesterday evening, May 16, when he and Graham Hunt, 29, attempted a wingsuit jump off of Taft Point in Yosemite Valley. Hunt was also killed.

Potter and Hunt jumped from the promontory overlooking the Valley then failed to respond to a friend's radio calls and did not appear at a predetermined meeting point. They were found Sunday morning by a police helicopter. Neither Potter nor Hunt had deployed their parachutes. The cause of the accident is pending an investigation.

Dean Potter was one of climbing most spiritual practitioners, doing what felt right rather than what would earn him more money or fame, although he earned the latter in abundance, his lanky unkempt person always drawing onlookers. Potter said that his three "arts" were climbing, wingsuit flying and slacklining. He excelled in all. He set the Nose speed record, made the first free solo of the Alien Roof on the Rostrum—he wore a parachute, "Free BASEing, the climb, as he called it—and slacklined the the Lost Arrow. An all-around athlete, Potter only last week set a new record for getting to the top of Half Dome and back down in 2:17:52, soloing Snake Dike (5.7) along the way.

Whatever Potter did, he did it his way and was troubled by watching the sport of climbing go from being a gang of rebels and even misfits who did their thing, flaunting conformity and regulation to err on the wild side, to a bunch of what he saw as clean-cut Wheaties-box athletes. "This homogenization of the Outdoor Industry has lasting ramifications," he told me last fall after he was fired as a sponsored athlete by Clif Bar for what he said was engaging in high-risk activities such as soloing and BASE jumping. "Outdoor Arts are beyond sport and for many of us it’s our spirituality. The wilderness is infinite in what it offers. Shouldn’t we question when the leaders of our community try to manipulate our culture into a monocrop?

"We are the last of the Wild. If we keep excluding the next most-wild-creature, sooner or later there will be nothing left."

On Saturday evening, May 16, BASE jumpers Dean Potter and Graham Hunt died after attempting a wingsuit flight from Taft Point, a 7,500-foot promontory that overlooks Yosemite Valley and El Capitan.

Potter has been a fixture on the climbing and BASE-jumping scene in Yosemite since the late 1990s. According to Yosemite chief of staff Mike Gauthier, the pair made the jump late Saturday. Their spotter heard two sounds that could have been impacts or could have been the noises made by parachutes snapping open. She followed standard protocols, first trying to reach the pair by radio, with no luck, and then moving to a predetermined meeting place. “They were optimistic, thinking that the men might have been arrested,” says Gauthier. BASE jumping is illegal in Yosemite National Park.

Yosemite Search and Rescue (YOSAR) initiated a hasty search, but the rangers were unable to locate the pair overnight. Potter and Hunt had been attempting to fly along terrain that required them to clear a notch in a rocky ridgeline. “It’s kind of a trickier flight to go through this notch,” Gauthier says. On Sunday morning, a state police helicopter was able to spot both bodies from the air. No parachutes had been deployed. Two rangers were then airlifted to the site to perform the recovery.

Survivors include Potter’s girlfriend Jennifer Rapp and his dog, Whisper, a blue heeler who has played a prominent role in Potter’s adventure life for the past few years.

Potter first came to prominence in Yosemite in the late nineties, when he began making bold solo and free-solo ascents of many of the park’s classic rock routes. By the middle oughts, he’d elevated slacklining—tightrope walking on a piece of webbing—to an extreme art form, making safe crossings of such notable features as Lost Arrow Spire, in Yosemite, and the Three Gossips feature in Arches National Park. Many times he’d make these crossings with no safety tether.

Potter came under fire in 2006 after he free soloed Delicate Arch, in Arches National Park, a sandstone feature that appears on Utah license plates. After the Delicate Arch climb, sponsor Patagonia dropped both Potter and his wife at the time, climber and BASE jumper Steph Davis. Potter always maintained that the ascent was both lawful and respectful. “I was just climbing a beautiful rock that hadn’t been free climbed before,” he told me in February.

Potter continued to innovate in the world of extreme sports. In 2008, he climbed the 5.12 Deep Blue Sea route on the north face of Switzerland’s 13,020-foot Eiger with only a parachute on his back. He dubbed the sport free-basing. He also began crossing highlines using a parachute for safety.

Last year Potter and Rapp produced a film called When Dogs Fly that chronicled Potter’s adventures BASE jumping with his dog, Whisper. The eventual footage of Whisper, wearing goggles and cinched between Potter’s back and his parachute pack, became an online sensation, though some people worried about Whisper’s safety.

Potter was 43.