Yosemite plunge: Fatal mistake in a sport with no room for error – SFGate

It’s an incredibly dangerous sport — jumping from mountaintops and flying at speeds topping 100 mph in full-body wingsuits, sailing within a few feet of rocky cliffs.

When Dean Potter and Graham Hunt did it Saturday at Yosemite National Park, they added an extra-difficult wrinkle, shooting through a narrow, V-shaped notch in a granite outcropping. There was zero margin for error — a standard that, tragically, the two extreme athletes didn’t meet.

Potter, 43, and Hunt, 29, were found dead about 50 yards apart below Taft Point, the 7,500-foot-high promontory overlooking Yosemite Valley from which they had jumped as the sun was setting Saturday.

They were wearing aerodynamic garments that allow a person to fly like a diving bird. The plan was to glide between two outcroppings through a pass, swoop left and then pull the cord on parachutes, allowing them to float gently down to the valley.

It was an especially risky form of BASE jumping, which is an acronym for what practitioners parachute from — Building, Antenna, Span and Earth. It’s illegal in Yosemite, but Potter and Hunt had nevertheless done it dozens of times at that very spot, their friends told investigators.

It isn’t clear exactly what went wrong, but Hunt apparently clipped the right side of the notch. Potter immediately swooped away, lost altitude and hit the rocks a split second later, according to park officials, who are trying to re-create the accident using still photographs and a GoPro camera that was mounted on Potter’s helmet.

Must think fast

“In this sport you have a fraction of a second to make a life-or-death decision,” said Tom Evans, a Yosemite photographer who writes about rock climbing in his blog, ElCap Report. “He has had thousands of jumps, but just one instant of inattention is all you need.”

Mike Gauthier, the park’s chief of staff, said photographs show the two men jumping off Taft Point and then flying for about 30 to 45 seconds until they reached the pass with rock ridges on each side about a half mile away.

He said Hunt had clipped the right side of the ridge as he entered the notch. Potter immediately cut left, possibly to avoid Hunt as he tumbled, and made it through the pass. He somehow lost altitude and hit the lower end on the left side of the notch. Both men were killed instantly.

“It could have been an evasive maneuver,” Gauthier said, trying to explain why Potter had crashed after it appeared he had made it through. “Someone else said they saw a clipped piece of a tree up there, so we don’t know for sure.”

Potter’s girlfriend Jenn Rapp shot video of the launch, then heard two impact sounds, Gauthier said. She tried to contact the men by text message and through an emergency radio, while Hunt’s girlfriend Rebecca Haynie waited below for them to land. The bodies were spotted the next morning by a California Highway Patrol helicopter.

The deaths stunned climbers around the world, mainly because Potter was considered the best, most innovative and careful wingsuit BASE jumper there ever was. He had been defying the odds for 25 years.

Potter was renowned for bold climbs, BASE jumps and slack-line walking — a loose form of tightrope —over thousand-foot drops, many of which have been captured on video. He holds the record for the longest flight in a wingsuit after BASE jumping from a ledge on the 13,020-foot summit of Switzerland’s Eiger mountain.

Paired climbing, jumping

He was the first person to combine rock climbing with BASE jumping — free-climbing sheer cliffs with no clamps or ropes, using only a parachute on his back as protection against a fall.

He and his friend Sean Leary broke the speed-climbing record on the Nose route of El Capitan in 2010. Leary died 14 months ago in a similar wingsuit jump in Zion National Park in Utah.

Despite the obvious dangers — dozens of people have died in recent years — Potter had been outspoken in his effort to make wingsuit BASE jumping legal in Yosemite.

Potter found Leary’s body after his fatal plunge. He told The Chronicle last year that they both understood the danger, but valued the freedom and inner peace that they found pushing limits.

“We all know the risks we take,” he said.

In a Men’s Journal interview in April, Potter told how he sometimes BASE jumped with his dog, Whisper, in a pack on his back. He called his pursuits his art.

High-risk activity

“The No. 1 goal being — out of concern for self and family but, also the representation of my arts — that I don’t ever get taken out” by making a mistake, he told Men’s Journal. “I want to prove that it can be done for a long life, until I’m an old man.”

Gauthier, who considered Potter a friend, said his rangers enforce the law against wingsuit jumping but cannot patrol every part of the park. He said climbers, BASE jumpers and rangers have been working hard to come to an understanding on the issues.

“BASE jumping is certainly a high-risk activity that people can make their own judgment on without, frankly, the Park Service piling on,” Gauthier said. “I think Dean understood the risks of BASE jumping as well as anyone.”