Dean Potter is a name that has resurfaced in mainstream culture since a four-part documentary about his life, The Dark Wizard, was released on HBO Max in April.
Once an underground, itinerant dirtbag who scorned fame and riches while chasing bright flames of dangerous passions, he rose to notoriety through what he called his “dark arts”—namely free soloing, highlining and BASE jumping. To put that in layman’s terms: climbing and highlining without a rope and parachuting off cliffs. All of which led him to become a practitioner of wingsuit flying and a progenitor of FreeBASE climbing (free solo climbing with a parachute on his back). In 2015 Potter died in a wingsuit BASE jumping accident in Yosemite Valley along with his twenty-nine-year-old companion, Graham Hunt. Potter was forty-three, the same age I am now.
When I came of age in the late 1990s and 2000s, Potter embodied what it meant to be a climber: a free spirit who saw beyond any perceived limitations; someone who channeled the wildness in his heart and pushed himself to the edge of his abilities, fully committed with everything at stake. He was in all the climbing media, all the ads. A rock star. For many of us, he defined the fashion and the attitude as well as the vision.
His writing and photos appear throughout the Alpinist archive since Alpinist 0 was published in 2002.
Soon after learning of the accident, Katie Ives, then editor of Alpinist, wrote a remembrance of Potter, titled “Poet of Light and Air.” She reflected:
Dean and I worked together for years on various writing projects, for Alpinist and elsewhere. And as an editor, you get to glimpse something of your writers’ inmost selves—those fragments of dreams and hopes and fears stirred up by the creative process.…
… He hoped that by confronting his fears … he might find a way to turn the nightmare around, to transform a terror of falling into a dream of flying, to find some hidden key to change the impossible into reality, to go beyond the limits of the physical and still return safely home.…
During those days of my unemployment when he tried so hard to look after my well-being, I thought of him as an older brother.…
He lived his life like a poem.
“I want to be a part of what turns this world more soulful,” he wrote to me in October 2008.
I want to tell him that he was.
Potter was a tragically flawed character, like any human, but regardless of one’s opinion of him as a person, there’s no denying his influence and inspiration.
Now with an Alpinist subscription, you can access the six digital Alpinist editions that trace his career, from beginning to end, and allow us a deeper glimpse into his mind through his words and photos.
Subscribe today and unlock the full digital six-issue Dark Wizard collection.
—Derek Franz, Editor-in-Chief, Alpinist