Original subtitles

[TV static drones]

[bright tone]

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- My whole life, I've been obsessed with the dream

of falling to my death.

♪ ♪

First, I'm in the air.

It's just massive wind speed.

And somehow there's these strange, faceless beings

beside me.

They're making weird squeaks.

[squawking]

For some reason, I know to do what they'll do, and I'll fly.

All of a sudden I'm flying,

but I become panicked and filled with anxiety,

start dive-bombing back towards the ground.

Right when I'm about to hit it and impact,

I wake up, sweating, heart beating,

you know, wondering if I'm dead.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

- When Dean picked up BASE jumping,

jumping off cliffs with a parachute,

you could tell that he was nervous.

♪ ♪

He was so edgy.

- [exhaling]

- Ten seconds! - Nine.

- Ten seconds!

- What? - I said ten seconds.

- OK.

Just telling Brad.

He was drawn like the moth to the flame,

to the most dangerous thing that he had found in his life.

- Three, two, one.

See ya.

[intense music]

♪ ♪

[Dan Deacon's "When I Was Done Dying"]

♪ ♪

- ♪ When I was done dying ♪

♪ My conscience regained ♪

♪ So I began my struggle ♪

♪ A nothingness strained ♪

♪ And I dreamt about climbing ♪

♪ Into the night sky ♪

♪ And I said all my prayers ♪

♪ Because surely I'll die ♪

♪ As I crashed down and smashed ♪

♪ Into Earth, into dirt ♪

♪ How my skin did explode ♪

♪ Leaving only my shirt ♪

♪ And the Earth looked at me ♪

♪ And said, wasn't that fun? ♪

♪ And I replied, ♪

♪ I'm sorry if I hurt anyone ♪

♪ She said better luck next time ♪

♪ Don't worry so much ♪

♪ Without ears I couldn't hear ♪

♪ I could just feel the touch ♪

♪ As I fell asleep softly ♪

♪ At the edge of a cave ♪

♪ But I should have gone deeper ♪

♪ But I'm not so brave ♪

[cawing]

- I'm Jay Epstein-Ramirez.

You know, BASE jumping, it's one of those sports

that runs right into you

and socks you in the side of the head

and just changes your life forever.

[light music]

Way back in the day,

I met Dean at this outdoor film festival.

Dean's climbing movie plays.

- [screaming]

- And then my movie plays of me of my friends

BASE jumping in Mexico.

And Dean's standing behind me as big as a tree.

And he's like, oh, my God, oh, my God.

I got to learn how to do this.

♪ ♪

Dean, you know, I knew the minute I met that guy

he was destined for madness.

[laughing]

Before you make your first BASE jump,

you need to learn how to skydive.

Practice and learn how to fly your body...

Where there's nothing to hit.

- Nice job, Dean.

- Ya!

- I was like, pack up the car. We're driving to Moab.

It's time for your first cliff jump.

Unlike skydiving, when you BASE jump,

there's no wind to work with,

so it's really easy to tumble out of control.

It's a lot like free soloing.

You have to really believe in yourself,

that you can launch in a perfect position.

- Five seconds.

- In your first jumps, goddamn, is it scary.

- OK.

- It's next-level scary, man.

- Whoo-hoo!

- Boy, you know, Dean's one of those guys,

when he likes something, he likes something.

- Oh, yeah! Ha!

- And he liked it.

- All of a sudden, he was getting

the dopamine that he needed.

[laughing]

This whole death consequence thing,

BASE jumping, the heaviest drug there was

in the heaviest dose,

and it was like, he lit up.

- Ba-boom.

All right, brother.

See ya.

- But it just made everybody fucking nervous.

I can tell you that.

- I had filmed BASE jumping before Dean got into it

and had a BASE jumper nearly die in front of my camera.

- [groans]

- Is he OK?

I began to mistrust the nature of the sport,

the addictive power of raw adrenaline

in these concentrations and these frequencies.

I warned him.

You're hitting the stuff too hard.

[tense music]

- Whoo!

- Let's go back to climbing, free soloing.

- Whoo!

So beautiful.

Yow!

- But Dean took it as the advice of a friend

that could be easily ignored.

[ominous music]

- I had been running trips to Mexico.

Wait till you guys get into this place.

It's like going to Mars.

Dean, I mean, he'd only been active

six months when I invited him to go jump

the Cave of the Swallows.

It's just this giant hole in the ground

that's perfect for BASE.

So you're jumping 1,200 feet into the Earth.

There's no wind.

It's almost impossible to hit anything.

It's really--even though Dean hit something.

The weather had been weird.

We'd gotten some rain.

[thunder rumbling]

And I think Dean's parachute got wet, and that's not good.

- Ten seconds.

Two, one, see ya.

- Dean jumps into the cave, and his parachute opened

twisted up.

- My parachute opened in a spin,

and I lost the perception of where I was flying.

- We had a rope hanging in there.

He hit the rope.

- The parachute collapsed and wrapped around the rope,

and I swung in and grabbed the rope.

- And he's 250, 300 feet off the ground with nothing.

And he's sliding down the rope--

- Burning off my skin on my hands.

- And I'm like, fucking don't let go, dude.

Don't let go.

- I thought is this, like, the dream, you know,

where I'm falling to my death?

And that feeling charged my body with this amazing power

and I held on with everything I had.

- Literally brakes himself, completely stops,

like, 2 feet off the ground.

And his hands are smoked.

You know, you can see tendons. You can see bone.

- When I hit the ground, part of me was ashamed,

but mostly I was just happy that I was alive.

As I laid there, there was this dying bird beside me.

Similar to what I had done, the swallow had hit the rope.

My friends came down and rescued me.

And I questioned, why did I live and that bird die?

- "I am drawn to the Pit of Swallows.

"I have a near-death accident.

And the dying swallow," which Dean has told me,

he felt came into his body and inhabited his body--

he just has, "and the dying swallow," period.

"I enter deep depression.

"My hands are injured badly.

"When you feel you are unstoppable,

you have to say, enough."

[soft guitar music]

I'm Elizabeth Potter, Dean's older sister,

and I'm a teacher and a writer.

Dean was eight years younger than me,

so he's the baby.

We grew up in a military family,

lived for a chunk of time overseas in the Middle East.

[eerie music]

When he was almost five, Dean decided

he was going to climb up this huge stone wall

around our house.

He fell off the very top

and knocked himself unconscious.

I probably should have been watching him

more carefully, but--

the story of my life.

After that, he was really plagued by nightmares

and night terrors.

Even when we were kids, you know,

Dean always talked about the dream of--

of falling.

In the journals, he says that again and again,

"The dream is back."

You know, he would say to me, do you have falling dreams?

And I did.

I mean, it's a common thing.

But for him, the dream was very real,

and it stayed with him.

♪ ♪

When we moved to New Hampshire,

for Dean, school could be difficult,

being, you know, that family that's not from here.

- When I was growing up,

I'd arrive at different schools

and never quite fit in.

In high school, I didn't make the basketball team.

It was a lot political.

I didn't hang out so much with all the other kids.

I was like an outsider.

And I started working out in the weight room,

getting stronger.

Went from being one of the weakest kids to now,

like, the strongest, toughest kid.

- I think that brought up that competitive thing

that Dean, throughout his life,

was trying to manage.

He wanted to be the best, you know?

He wanted to win.

It's been said that Dean was a combination

of his Army colonel father and his yoga-teaching mother.

There was some truth to that,

but my parents were not a stereotype.

Dad was not a disciplinarian at all

and wanted everybody to just have a good time.

And my mother, a lot of Dean's spirituality,

his meditation, comes from my mom.

But mom was a disciplinarian.

The strictness-- this is what you will do.

This is how you will behave.

[soft dramatic music]

She would say, you know,

you're not going to do anything dangerous.

If you look at pretty much any picture of Dean and Mom,

she's got one hand on him, this grip.

You combine that with a spirit like Dean's,

he felt controlled, held down.

[tense music]

If you look at his writing during that time,

it's very rageful, angry

like a trapped animal.

Dean talks in the journals about the sad gene

or crazy gene,

his code for the depression in our family.

You know, especially kind of in the--the years

leading up to my parents' divorce,

you could feel that energy, that darkness

of a relationship that was coming apart.

It got ugly.

Dean was seeing that his father did not have

freedom of voice and choice.

Yeah, that really affected Dean in his own relationships.

He was always, "No one's going to tell me what to do.

"No one's going to control my life.

I'm going to do things my way."

That was when he started escaping to Joe English.

- There was this cliff on this army base near where I lived,

and it was just me and this friend of mine

scrambling around,

coming across these little crags,

going into these off-limits zones.

It was against the rules.

And that's kind of what attracted us to it,

was just being free, doing what we wanted.

- He would climb without the right equipment,

using whatever he could find.

And then he would climb without any equipment at all.

- In my teens, I started free soloing

on this cliff near my house.

Being out there alone with no protection,

it scared me so much,

but that kind of magnetized me to it.

I always thought my early childhood dream

was the premonition of my death.

And I wanted to prove to myself

that I could overpower it,

trying to push harder and harder into that fear.

- So much of his life has been to prove the dream wrong,

plunging forward towards his fear

and trying to conquer it,

saying to himself, I'm not going to--

I'm not going to die.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

- That near-death experience in the cave,

it humbled him a little bit.

- So I don't know if any of you guys

heard about my little mishap down in the Caves of--

Cave of the Swallows, but it wasn't a whole lot of fun.

And I'm still kind of sorting things out in my head.

- But then I think less than three months later,

he actually, like, comes back and is fully functional

and jumping again.

And, yeah, crazy, right?

- Look at that.

- I got the call from Dean.

He said, can you come out to Yosemite?

I want to jump El Cap.

I want to jump everything.

For a BASE jumper here in the United States,

Yosemite, it's the pinnacle--

huge cliffs, perfect for BASE.

Biggie, biggie, biggie.

- I've always put all my energy into,

you know, holding on to the rock face.

Looking great, buddy.

- Now, to have the skill

to fly your body off the walls,

this whole new world has opened up.

- You've always wanted to jump off El Cap.

- Yes, you're right. Here it is.

- Here it is.

See ya, Dean. You're the man.

Yeah!

He was horny as horny gets, man.

I mean, the kid was on fire.

- OK. No touching.

No problem, Dean.

See ya.

[rock music]

He owned the Valley. I mean, he really did.

He had just been there for so many years.

He knew all the cliff exits and landings.

The only problem is,

Yosemite has a steadfast policy

against BASE jumping.

- The National Park Service says they ban jumping

for a lot of reasons.

- Gathering spectators

and disrupting the serenity of the Valley.

National parks weren't set up so that everybody could

recreate in every way they wanted.

- See ya! [cheering]

- In the '90s, pretty famous BASE jumper, Frank Gambalie...

- All right, kids, this is the real deal.

- He was jumping off El Cap.

Somebody ratted him out, just told the rangers,

and they were waiting for him.

He tried to outrun them

and swim across the Merced River,

and he drowned.

The guy survives all these BASE jumps,

and then he's killed by just trying

to get away from the rangers.

- After the death of Frank Gambalie,

there was quite an uproar and threats of a mass jump.

- A few months later, BASE jumpers organized

a protest jump on El Cap.

- Whoo! [cheering]

- I was there in the meadow.

BASE jumpers land and shake hands with the rangers.

Let's try and find some common ground here.

- I am not a criminal.

I am simply an American.

- The agreement was, the park service would

confiscate their parachutes and their gear.

- Nine, eight...

- And then, this woman, Jan Davis, jumped off,

and I could see it.

- See ya!

- Jan didn't want to lose her stuff,

so she used gear that somebody loaned her.

The problem was, she was used to having a pilot chute

mounted on her leg straps.

- And she came down and she came down,

and then she started flailing.

- She's got problems, man.

- She's just reaching on her leg

looking for this pilot chute.

- And from where I was, which was

at the top of a tree in a meadow,

I saw her hit the ground.

- Dude, she's got--she went in. Oh, my God.

- What?

- Boom. It just--boom.

- She went in?

What the fuck?

[tense music]

- After that,

the park services were, like, see?

- BASE jumpers basically became

public enemy number one.

For the next few years, BASE jumping in Yosemite

was pretty quiet.

But Dean changed that.

- Here in Yosemite, we're in one of the most wild places

left in our country.

But BASE jumping,

this ultimate expression of freedom,

for some reason, that threatens them.

And unfortunately it means that I need to evade the law.

- You know, when Dean embraced BASE jumping,

he really introduced this new era to Yosemite.

Check him out. Check him out. Sick.

How cool is that?

- Dean definitely inspired a lot of the Monkeys.

If you were a climber and wanted to start--

start jumping, you had his example.

- This game of BASE jumping in Yosemite,

it was sort of secretive society.

It was like a ninja society.

- Dean mentored and coached all of us.

- Good.

- Dean was like a father in this way.

- Yeah, check me out.

He was very meticulous.

- Dean was doing crazy stuff.

- That looks good. That looks good.

- But he was really good at minimalizing the risk.

- Make it to a nice safe spot on the far side.

- OK, amigo.

- The fact that it's illegal adds a whole other, like,

level of tension.

But Dean had figured out these rules.

Don't jump in the middle of the day.

- We should hold off another 15 minutes at least.

- 15 minutes, Dean say.

- Early morning, evening,

that minimizes your chances of getting caught.

- Let's wait, though. - We got a guy down there.

- You always have ground crew. It would often be Bullwinkle.

- Someone talked with Winky?

- My job was to ensure that my jumper does not get

apprehended by law enforcement.

- It's looking almost ready for us.

- The first time we ever jumped in Yosemite...

- He got a BASE rig,

and then I had to get a BASE rig, you know.

- Dean gave us advice.

Scary.

He down climbed to a ledge they call the electric chair.

Holy shit.

Pretty focused, pretty gripped.

- Yeah, whenever you're ready.

- Fucking hell.

My glasses are steamed up, man.

Dean was just calm, relaxed.

- Take them off. Calm down.

You ready, brother? - Yeah.

- Let's do it. - OK.

Three, two, one.

- Three, two, one.

- People will be like, you know, three, two, one,

see ya, or, like, ready, set, go or something like that.

And then maybe just sometimes you--

you're not ready.

- I usually don't count, though, that's the thing.

- What do you mean you don't count?

- I just don't count.

I just kind of go when it feels good, you know.

- OK. Want me to count then?

Want me to count?

All right, Corb, you ready? - One--

- Wait, wait, wait, three, two, one or one, two, three?

- Three, two, one. - Wait, wait.

What about three, two, one, see ya?

- I don't like three, two, one, see ya.

Let's just do on one, two, three, go.

- All right. - OK. That's the count.

- All right.

- Holy fuck.

One, two, three.

- See ya.

- Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

[intense music]

♪ ♪

- Go. - See ya.

- Dean just told me, man, I love you.

You will see another world now.

- See ya! - Right on down.

♪ ♪

[whooshing]

- I can remember making that comment.

I was, like, damn, like, all the climbers are jumping.

He just looked at me with a stern Dean voice.

He goes, I know.

It's happening.

[laughing] He was just, like, prophesizing.

- Here I come!

- Right on, bros.

Let's get it on.

- Another one.

- Yeah!

- For the park service and the federal government,

this was blatantly illegal behavior in a national park.

Dean was the face of BASE jumping

in Yosemite Valley, period.

- As soon as that parachute opens,

I'm just scanning for rangers and looking

for my escape route.

- These guys better haul ass.

- Run. There's a car.

- Dean was high profile, naturally drew attention.

The law enforcement officers and park rangers

would have known Dean, if caught BASE jumping,

would represent a big catch.

They are spending years now of manpower,

but I do what I do well,

and they're not going to catch me.

- I mean, I think Dean had to have something

to rebel against.

- Yeah.

- He saw that ranger as a sort of oppressive,

authoritarian, tool-like figure.

That was his word, the tool.

- If you're looking at this, tool, I'm not very happy.

Yeah.

- Which I think means, like, tools

of fascist oppression or something.

- Yeah, we're going to jump this ding, ding,

ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, diggity dog spire.

And this was one way to sock it to the tool.

Here it is in your face,

and there's nothing you can do about it.

- Jumping the spire.

[yelping] Jumping the spire.

- That was fucking awesome.

BASE jumped with Dean today.

- Yeah. - He's the man.

- Yeah.

- Flying with the fucking ravens.

[ethereal music]

♪ ♪

- It had been a couple of years

since the whole Delicate Arch scandal

where Dean had lost his hero status.

But now he was something even better.

He was a fucking antihero.

- He was even more like that revolutionary,

that outsider, that outcast.

- He became somewhat paranoid,

and he stayed within this very tight-knit,

secretive group of people.

- People worshipped Dean, and they followed Dean.

I mean, we all did. - Yeah.

- His energy was so fucking intense.

- The dark parts of Dean, the mystical part of Dean,

was coming to the fore.

- And he was convinced that he had some connection

with fucking ravens.

[ravens cawing]

- You looked at him, he looked kind of like a raven.

They both kind of had this gothic, doomsday vibe to them.

- There was something magical about Dean,

but there was also this darkness that lurked inside.

- That's why we started calling him the Dark Wizard.

- The Dark Wizard.

- He drew his strength from this dark energy.

- The whole Dark Wizard thing and the magnetism around Dean

was very cultlike.

- Dean had been dominating the scene

in Yosemite for almost a decade,

soloing harder than anyone,

BASE jumping harder than anyone.

- He was still the most badass motherfucker

in the Valley, right?

- Nice.

- And we thought we would never see anyone

challenge Potter's dominance.

But, you know, nothing is forever.

The next generation comes,

and they push the limits further.

- Common slate, take one mark.

- My name is Alex Honnold.

I'm a professional rock climber.

Growing up in suburban California,

my climbing gym showed VHS climbing films on loop.

So I would have been 14 when "Masters of Stone V" came out.

Watching Dean Potter going up a huge wall by himself,

looking like a total stud--

yeah, this had a big impression on 14-year-old me.

I just remember thinking that is what

badass climbing looks like.

I want to be able to do that.

When I was 19, I dropped out of college, went to Yosemite,

following directly in Dean's footprints.

Basically, I wanted to climb everything

that Dean had ever climbed.

- Alex shows up in the Valley, hungry to repeat

the achievements of his idol,

and he starts ticking them off pretty fast.

We're, like, who the fuck is this kid, you know?

- When I got to Yosemite, all the cool kids,

the Stone Monkeys were spending a lot of time

enjoying themselves, BASE jumping,

dropping acid and doing rope jumps.

- Life's pretty good here in Yosemite Valley, baby.

Whoo! Yeah!

- Yeah! - Whoo!

- I came to climbing

with a slightly more focused approach.

I would show up in Yosemite with, you know,

goals and, like, spreadsheets.

I was really into fitness and training,

doing 150 pullups before bed every night.

Highlining and BASE jumping,

I didn't do any of those things.

- There was a bit of a generational change.

We were kind of countercultural

and fuck the rules.

- Hey. How are you doing?

- Alex was this dork.

- Do you have girls in here a lot?

- Do I look like I have girls in here a lot?

- But we all saw this talent.

- I filmed with Eric Perlman from "Masters of Stone VI."

It was a big deal for me to make it

into one of the "Masters of Stone" movies.

- Oh, there's this new kid, Alex Honnold.

Dean was actually jealous.

He said, well, I free solo those.

I said, yeah, but I kind of want to open the doors

to some other people.

And I don't think he really took it that well.

- So this is--this is my original climbing journal.

It is a log of everything I've ever climbed.

Has no emotional component to it.

It's just a list of routes.

Oh, here we go.

Hong Kong Phooey.

- Hong Kong Phooey is a climb of legend,

Dean Potter's visionary first ascent,

the hardest crack in the desert.

- Fuck!

- This was a climb that took Dean

months of brutal effort.

- [straining]

- The crack was so narrow that he had

to jam his bare toes into it...

- Fuck!

- Pop Vicodin just to deal with the pain.

- [spitting]

- I made my way to Utah seeking out Hong Kong Phooey.

I climbed it.

I don't know, I think I did it second go.

I think.

Like, why do you take off one shoe?

Why do you take Vicodin?

Why do you do all these things?

I was just kind of like, yeah, I wore my shoes.

It was great. It's fun, you know.

I'll go climbing again tomorrow.

With Dean, I built him up on this pedestal,

this incredible mythical figure.

And then, when I started to repeat some of his routes,

I was, like, oh, you know.

It turns out that he's still just a climber,

and anybody can go climb his routes if they try.

- Honnold was quoted in this "Climbing" magazine article,

basically called Dean's climb easy.

- Your quote was,

"I wouldn't even call them accomplishments,

"just another day of climbing.

"If you don't put any work into something,

it's not nearly as meaningful."

- [chuckles]

Yeah, I can see how the quote would

rub somebody the wrong way.

I think now in retrospect, I would phrase it

a little bit differently, just so that it pays

proper respect to the effort that Dean put

into establishing the route.

- Dean definitely read that.

Ooh.

Here's a new kid on the block denigrating his achievement.

- Nobody had challenged Dean like that.

This is no longer somebody paying homage to their hero.

This is someone coming for their spot.

[tense music]

- At that point, I was young.

I was hungry, thinking, what can I do that's new,

that's a step further?

How can I make a splash?

[adventurous music]

♪ ♪

- Moonlight Buttress is a big wall

in Zion National Park.

When Honnold went up there, it was the proudest solo

that had ever been done.

- There was something else about this guy

unlike anything you'd ever seen.

- [straining]

- Dean is all about confronting the fear.

With Honnold, it was like this weird ability

to not be afraid.

- Oh, check out the no-hand knee bar, baby.

Yeah.

I just don't feel fear as viscerally as other people.

It's all just constructs in your head,

shit that you make up.

- People were stunned.

♪ ♪

This kid, who is kind of a one in a billion climbing freak,

dropped right into Dean's wheelhouse,

playing precisely his game.

For someone who had a monstrous, colossal,

psychotic ego, that has to have been

massively destabilizing.

- He always said he hated the fact

that he was competitive.

- That competitiveness, oh, it was there,

deep down inside of him.

- [exhaling]

- Honnold lit a fire under Dean's ass.

- [exhaling]

Yeah, yeah.

♪ ♪

- He was trying to figure out, where is my limit?

- [screams]

- How far can I push it and stay alive?

- [exhaling]

Fuck.

[groans]

- But I remember thinking--

- Fuck!

- I'm not sure if he has a plan.

- ♪ Hong Kong Phooey ♪

- ♪ Quicker than the human eye ♪

[vocalizing]

♪ Bow, wow, wow ♪

- Nobody should try tightrope walking

unless he works for a circus.

See what I mean?

- Whoa!

- But, of course, there was something cooking

in that manic brain of his.

- He knew that, if he was going to try to one-up Alex

through soloing harder things, he was going to die.

He knew what his limit was soloing.

Alex is a younger, stronger, better climber than he was

and a better soloist than anyone's ever been.

[tense music]

But Dean has all these other skills.

He's got really good vision.

If you want to get into that competition with Alex,

you're just going to have to focus everything

that you've got, every resource you have.

The Dark Wizard was going to use his alchemy to create

something new, some dark arts.

- As humans, we are so limited by the fear

we have of falling to our death,

and, like, my mind's spinning on how to change that.

- If you free solo and you're climbing without a rope,

you fall, you die.

So generally you climb a good notch below your limit.

But imagine if you could find a way

to really push your limits.

Instead of certain death, you've got a chance.

- How can I turn my biggest fear into, you know,

something I'm comfortable with?

- Dean came up with the concept

of climbing without a rope

but with a parachute instead.

- If I fall off the rock, I think I have

a fair chance to survive

through this BASE free solo, you know?

I call it freeBASE.

- BASE jumping is already dangerous enough,

but the freeBASE thing just seemed so out there.

[suspenseful music]

- Dean had been looking for a place

to do some test runs of this idea.

He decided to go to Europe,

where it was legal to BASE jump--

the first proof of concept.

[wind whistling]

- [straining]

When I'm on the wall climbing,

knowing I'm going to take a fall,

I'm just feeling real scared and real exposed out there.

Sure, I have the BASE rig,

but that's still super uncertain.

[breathing heavily]

I'm fighting to control the adrenaline

pumping through me.

[breathing heavily]

♪ ♪

I'm kind of way over-amping.

Whoo!

[shouting]

[tense music]

♪ ♪

- Fucking intense, man. - [laughs]

With freeBASE, I love the idea

that I can change the worst possible thing

to the best possible thing, dying to flying.

The biggest danger is hitting the wall.

[grunts]

I need to spin my body

and enter into the tracking position

with my hands at my side

to rocket away from the wall.

It's all really difficult to do,

but I want to get to a point where I feel a comfort level.

At least in my mind, this allows me to try things

that I would never try to free solo.

I think it has good potential to be

taken further and further.

- Once he knew it was possible,

he wanted to take this somewhere iconic.

- He chooses this route in Switzerland on the Eiger,

this mythical place in climbing lore.

- The Eiger.

On its north buttress,

there's a shield of blue limestone.

It's the perfect route for the first freeBASE.

- Up through here.

- When I heard about the freeBASE concept

on the Eiger,

it's an incredible idea.

And I thought, from the beginning,

it was possible.

I got a call from Dean, and he said,

I have some money for working on a documentary.

He has this whole production company involved,

but he wanted to keep things small,

just a one-man camera crew.

We had been friends for a lot of years.

And I had been there for most of Dean's big ascents.

People would call me the Dean Whisperer

'cause I could navigate the mood swings.

When he asked whether or not I'd want to come along

and film it, I instantly said yes.

[bells ringing]]

When I joined him in Switzerland,

he had shaved his head.

Gave him kind of a aggro look.

Instead of hippie Dean, it was like Dean here to do business.

[adventurous music]

♪ ♪

Dean wanted to BASE jump as much as possible

to prepare himself.

[indistinct chatter]

We stayed down beneath the Eiger in Lauterbrunnen.

- See ya.

- That whole area is like

the BASE jumping capital of Europe.

Dean was enamored with the BASE scene there.

[laughter]

But in my opinion, the whole scene was pretty disturbing.

It was like hanging out with drug addicts.

- No, and I've never smoked crack either.

Yeah.

You'd be hanging out with people,

and they'd go out BASE jumping.

Somebody would die.

And like, people just didn't really talk about it.

They just kept jumping, kind of joking.

Hopefully not splattered.

- [laughs]

- Set. Go.

- One morning, things didn't go as planned.

He kind of got this side-to-side wobble.

[wind rushing]

- Oh, damn it!

- [groans]

- A bunch of BASE jumpers showed up.

- 25 meters, yeah.

- They all thought it was kind of a funny thing.

[laughter]

- Hey!

- It's quite amusing to see the best climber in the world

get stuck in a tree.

- Yeah, it was lucky.

- Dean had this really out-there emotional energy.

It worried me, his behavior, his decision-making.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

Eventually we headed up to the Eiger for the freeBASE.

♪ ♪

He wanted to climb this route, Deep Blue Sea.

You do this traverse.

All of a sudden, it drops off a couple thousand feet.

Then you climb up this headwall to the top.

Wild to think about free soloing this route

with nothing but a parachute to save himself.

Dean rappelled in to practice the climb.

- [breathing heavily]

- The climbing was more difficult

than he was expecting.

- [breathing heavily]

- He was having a hard time doing the moves.

♪ ♪

He needed to practice a lot more.

♪ ♪

But, you know, the weather would come in,

and then the rock would stay wet for days.

- Don't have to go very far for the water.

Drinking from the belly of the Eiger.

- We built a camp right on the side of the Eiger.

Anything you want to say?

- It feels pretty claustrophobic

inside this fog.

[thunder rumbling]

[laughing] Ooh, lightning.

Could be setting in for another

14 or 16 hours of sleep.

- After days festering up there,

Dean would kind of go to a dark place,

just stare off into space for hours.

I think he felt pressure to do this climb,

to make this film, and stay in the limelight.

Why not--why not just solo stuff you can control?

[ominous music]

- It all came to a head one day.

He was, like, getting really impatient.

The weather had been bad for a long time,

and he's like, I'm going to go for it.

♪ ♪

It didn't seem good to me.

It didn't seem like he was in the right headspace.

♪ ♪

He starts out on the traverse.

I'm up above on this fixed line,

and there's clouds moving in.

♪ ♪

The problem was, if he does fall,

he needs to be able to see his landing zone

and any obstacles that could be in the way.

- [breathing heavily]

♪ ♪

- I was hoping he would climb back across

and bail on the attempt, but he kept going.

♪ ♪

He was forcing it.

It just felt like really forcing it.

♪ ♪

And he gets up to, like, the hardest section.

♪ ♪

And he has this sequence he has to nail.

♪ ♪

- [grunts]

- He blows his sequence.

- Fuck.

- And he looks at me like deer in the headlights like, fuck.

I'm fucked. I can't--

he couldn't reverse the move he was doing.

But with the clouds, he couldn't jump off.

He's like, you got to come get me.

- Jim, drop the end.

- OK.

I've got all the rope coiled underneath me,

and he's like, dude, hurry, I'm barely in here.

- If you don't drop the end, I die.

- OK, I will.

- Please, Jim, will you drop the frickin' end?

- It's twisted. - Well, I--I--

I need it dropped.

- Got a little slack to it, a whole bunch.

- More. More.

More.

Ahh, fucker.

- Get the anchor.

And then get down to him and I get near him,

and he grabs onto my leg, like, onto my foot.

And from my leg, he grabs my harness like that

and clipped into the line

and then rapped down to the ledge.

- I'm going to dangle now, Jim.

- I was really angry.

I was like, tell me if I'm wrong,

but everything about this today felt wrong,

and you went anyway.

And that was, like, the first time that--

I don't know.

It was like the first time that had happened.

[ominous music]

And then it got worse 'cause I called him on it.

And I said, if you're doing this for any other reason

than you wanting to do this climb,

you're an absolute fucking idiot.

And he tweaked, of course.

[laughing]

Alpha male, being talked to like that.

He said, well, at least we got the footage,

and I'm like, dude, like, you know,

there's a bigger picture here.

I thought of the one thing I could do

that could really get his attention.

And I was like, I'm going to delete the footage.

He's like, you're not going to destroy my art!

He took a rock, and he, like, threw the rock at me.

And I'm like, you motherfucker,

and I put the camera down.

And I took a rock, and I threw it at him.

This whole time, this weather has been moving in,

and he's literally chasing me across the Eiger.

I ran off and hid.

Kind of, what the fuck am I doing up here?

Eventually the testosterone subsided.

I hear this voice, "I'm so angry!

I can't find my way down!"

[laughs]

And I think I yelled--

I was like, dude, I love you.

We got back to camp.

He was embarrassed, really unhappy.

- I'm Dean Potter.

And I'm a great guy.

I don't have much value for my life.

Just going out on the solo end where I'm probably going

to eat it just for the camera.

That's pretty much what I come down to.

I don't think I'm a very good role model for children.

[somber music]

♪ ♪

- I think he cried all night.

♪ ♪

The next day, we wandered down

and took the train back to Lauterbrunnen.

I was, like, fully intending to leave.

I had had enough Dean.

But he wanted me to stay.

I felt like I was there partially

to try to help keep him alive.

- The weather had been bad for weeks and weeks,

and I was kind of freaking out that I couldn't do my thing.

Instead of being the zen master

I want to be or whatever,

I gave in to some thoughts that I should have said no to.

That's the whole underlying theme in my life is--

is, no going over the line.

And then I did.

You know, the clouds were there.

You're going to die if you fall into clouds.

♪ ♪

Had to call for Jim to--

to rescue me all because I was feeling the ego pulling

and couldn't control myself.

I was trying to push a little bit more than--

than was there.

♪ ♪

- Dean, he was often asking himself,

what is my primary motivator here?

Why am I doing what I'm doing?

He had the devil on the shoulder

of--of wanting to be better than somebody

or just wanting to be recognized.

And I think, in his most centered moments,

he knew it's getting in the way

of that pure expression

of what you're really capable of.

♪ ♪

[water splashing]

- A couple weeks later, the weather cleared.

Somehow he convinced me to go back up with him.

It's like drinking hard, you know.

Once you forget how bad it really was,

you're like, oh, yeah, why not?

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

[scratching]

- My whole body's tingling.

♪ ♪

[breathing heavily]

- And he gets up to the spot where I had to rescue him.

- [exhaling]

- He gets everything perfect.

♪ ♪

[exciting music]

♪ ♪

- Up there on the Eiger, kind of had

this crazy feeling where I knew I was doing

this totally out-there thing that I would never do

without the parachute on.

But with the spark of the idea and the intention

and the willpower,

the impossible can become reality.

♪ ♪

Whoo!

- It was kind of classic Dean.

The entire thing was a fiasco, and then he pulls it off.

- Three, two, one, see ya.

- It was mad genius.

[adventurous music]

♪ ♪

Whoo!

[electronic music]

- People thought this crazy freeBASEing shit

was so compelling.

- And it went to newspapers and television.

- Standing at the base of the world-famous Eiger

for Dean Potter's free solo BASE climb.

- And then Dean wanted to take the concept

to different disciplines.

- Combining BASE jumping with highlines,

losing the idea I once had

that falling off the line was death,

it's like a huge perception change.

- Pretty quickly, you know, Dean was everywhere.

- It wasn't just inventing new sports.

It was this Dark Wizard mystique.

- This man performs to no one.

- Some of that media attention,

it was pretty over the top.

- This is a man obsessed and willing to risk it all.

- But he didn't care.

He created this incredible spectacle

that took his shit to a new level.

- "Dean Potter: Adventurer of the Year."

- Dean Potter is a paradigm shift in athletic achievement.

- And now he's got some brand-new

sponsorship contracts.

He's, like, becoming more and more famous,

getting more and more money.

Like, bling.

[screaming]

- And everybody was impressed

except, of course, for one guy.

- I mean, it's easy to be the best

if you're the only one doing it.

And I feel like Dean really took that to darker pastures.

When I saw Dean freeBASEing, I was like,

that's a fun trick.

Like, that's a weird gimmick.

You know, it's, like, really beautiful to watch.

Like, it's really good on film.

But why don't you just solo the route without a parachute?

That's way cooler of an achievement.

FreeBASEing, highlining--

like, leave it to circus performers

who probably do it better anyway.