SAN FRANCISCO — Two wingsuit fliers who leaped from a cliff in Yosemite National Park were trying to zoom through a notch in a ridge line and were airborne for about 15 seconds when they slammed into a rocky outcropping and were killed, a friend said Monday.
Dean Potter, 43, and Graham Hunt, 29, were experienced at flying in wingsuits — the most extreme form of BASE jumping.
On Saturday, wearing the “flying squirrel” outfits that have fabric stitched between the arms and body and between the legs to keep them aloft, Potter and Hunt leaped off Taft Point, 3,500 feet above the valley floor. They would have been traveling at speeds close to 100 mph as they aimed for the narrow gap in the ridge.
Their bodies were found in a notch they had already flown through about a dozen times, professional climber Alex Honnold said. No one knows exactly what went wrong. A gust of wind or a slight miscalculation could have sent them off course, hurtling into rock.
“What they were doing is pretty routine” for them, Honnold said. “Not like a once-in-a-lifetime performance.”
BASE jumping is illegal in national parks. Doing it in a wingsuit is even more dangerous, particularly the form Potter practiced, gliding frighteningly close to cliffs and trees before deploying his chute.
Potter was “the big inspiration to the climbing community in the last generation,” and Hunt “was maybe the most prolific BASE jumper in the valley right now,” said Honnold.
Potter thought he had found ways of safely enjoying some of the world’s riskiest endeavors. He scaled the toughest vertical faces without rope, and walked barefoot across lines suspended between cliffs. If he fell or became exhausted, he would deploy a parachute.
As if that didn’t provide enough adrenaline, Potter wanted to fly.
At least five people have died in BASE jumping accidents in national parks since January 2014, including the most recent deaths at Yosemite, said Jeffrey Olson, a National Park Service spokesman. Two of those were at Utah’s Zion and one at Glacier in Montana.
In 2009, Potter set a record for completing the longest BASE jump, from the Eiger North Face in Switzerland, by staying in flight in a wingsuit for 2 minutes and 50 seconds. The feat earned him the Adventurer of the Year title by National Geographic magazine.
Potter’s solo ascent of Utah’s iconic Delicate Arch in May 2006 prompted the National Park Service to ban climbing any of the named arches or natural bridges in Arches National Park. The outdoor clothing company Patagonia stopped sponsoring him, saying his actions “compromised access to wild places and generated an inordinate amount of negativity in the climbing community and beyond.”
But Potter held onto Adidas and other sponsors, even after he packed his miniature Australian cattle dog, Whisper, on his back for some of his jumps and was criticized by animal rights groups.
Another sponsor was Five Ten footwear, whose spokeswoman, Nancy Bouchard, said “Dean would have pursued these activities whether he was supported or not. In the back of our minds, we always knew something terrible could happen, but that didn’t and doesn’t diminish our feelings.”