The morning earlier than Dean Potter died, in Could, 2015, he and his girlfriend, Jennifer Rapp, had been puttering round their home in Yosemite. Potter, the world-famous rock climber and daredevil, had simply returned from a visit to Germany, and Rapp had flown in from Vancouver, the headquarters of the attire firm Arc’teryx, the place she was head of communications. In the lounge, Rapp tried on some attire for Potter. “Assist me choose one,” she mentioned.
They had been scheduled to fly the subsequent morning to New York, to attend a gala the place he was to obtain one thing known as an Motion Maverick Award. Potter disliked New York, and cities basically, and deliberate on staying only one evening, however he was uncommonly enthusiastic about this specific honor, as a result of it acknowledged him as an artist. Not too long ago, he’d been attempting, principally in useless, to persuade the world, and himself, that he carried out vertiginous feats—free soloing on El Capitan, highlining over Yosemite Falls, BASE leaping in a wingsuit off the Eiger—to not stoke his ego or his repute however, as an alternative, to precise a sublime swashbuckling harmony with the pure world. Having been surpassed, as an athlete, by Alex Honnold, the brand new free soloist within the valley, Potter, then in his early forties, reimagined himself as a efficiency artist, of a form. The Maverick Award was a validation.
Potter helped Rapp select a gown: one by Missoni, with shiny colours. A buddy, Graham Hunt, Potter’s wingsuiting sidekick, was attributable to drop by to do tree work on land they’d purchased close by, however, preferring to relax out alone with Rapp, Potter left a message telling him to not come. Hunt didn’t get that message, although, and turned up quickly afterward. “That modified the course of our day,” Rapp mentioned not too long ago. “We wouldn’t have frolicked with Graham, and Dean wouldn’t have died.” Not on that day, anyway.
That afternoon, Potter, Rapp, and Hunt hiked out to Taft Level, a prow of granite overlooking Yosemite Valley. Of their flying-squirrel fits, Hunt and Potter jumped off a promontory and swooped towards a ridge with a slot in it known as the Notch. They didn’t make it. Rapp, up on Taft Level, heard two thuds. A restoration group discovered the our bodies within the Notch the subsequent day.
The accident within the Notch is the climax of “The Darkish Wizard,” a brand new four-part HBO documentary about Potter and his demons. The movie’s administrators, Nick Rosen and Peter Mortimer, and its co-creator Josh Lowell, additionally made “The Alpinist,” in 2021, about one other doomed mountain man, they usually produce Reel Rock, a perennial travelling competition of climbing movies, so that they’re accustomed to tragic endings. Nonetheless, the newest movie, owing to Potter’s emotional turbulence and a few of the wreckage he left behind, was essentially the most fraught undertaking they’ve taken on.
“There’s been a break with custom since we had been right here final.”
Cartoon by Frank Cotham
A number of days after Potter died, Rapp acquired an e-mail from the lady behind the Maverick Awards, a choreographer named Elizabeth Streb. Potter and Rapp had first met her on the Telluride Mountainfilm Competition, the place she was selling Catherine Gund’s film about her, “Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity.” Streb’s work incorporates what she known as “excessive motion,” a variety of falling and crashing into issues. She and Potter hit it off.
“He, like me, believed he might fly, and devoted his life to that proposition,” Streb mentioned the opposite day. “We’ve a concept of the true transfer—it’s one that when initiated you possibly can’t cease. We focus on letting the bottom cease us and coaching our our bodies to take the hit. There’s no such factor as good security. There’s solely making ready and coaching.”
The evening after Potter died, Streb, at her gala, introduced his award in absentia. “I’m gathering the whole lot collectively for you,” she wrote afterward, in her e-mail to Rapp. “The Award itself, along with his identify and an inscription”; additionally, “a video we put collectively of his work [and] a video of an ‘Motion’ my dancers carried out for him known as ‘Head First’ and some photographs of the Night.”
Rapp, in her desolation, by no means replied, so she by no means obtained to see the award or the movies. They haven’t spoken since. Rapp doesn’t have the gown anymore. ♦
