Who Was Dean Potter, the Controversial Climber of HBO’s ‘The Dark Wizard’?

Rock-climber Alex Honnold has made a name for himself surviving death-defying vertical ascents without safety precautions, as seen in the 2018 documentary Free Solo and this year’s Netflix special Skyscraper Live. Dean Potter, however, wasn’t so lucky, and the new HBO docuseries The Dark Wizard, which premiered Tuesday, April 14, at 9/8c, chronicles Potter’s controversial life and his tragic death.

HBO calls the four-episode doc an “up-close and unflinching portrait of Dean Potter, one of the world’s most influential and controversial climbers, BASE jumpers, and highline walkers,” which “traces the jaw-dropping feats that made him a legend, as well as the personal turmoil that defined his life.”

Dean Potter was a rock climber and BASE jumper whose stunts sometimes rankled onlookers and sponsors.

Potter loved climbing from a young age. Patricia Dellert, his mother, told the Los Angeles Times in 1998 that when the family was living in Jordan, where Potter’s Army colonel father was stationed, a then 5-year-old Potter tried to climb the stone wall next to their house.

In his 20s, Potter became a climbing legend at Yosemite National Park in California, becoming the first person to free climb three-quarters of the way up the face of the park’s Half Dome rock formation and then the first person to free climb both Half Dome and the nearby El Capitan formation in less than 24 hours, according to the Times.

Like Honnold, Potter would also climb walls and cliffs without ropes. One of these “free solo” stunts was a 2006 ascent of the Delicate Arch in Utah’s Arches National Park. The clothing company Patagonia dropped its sponsorship of Potter as a result, saying his climb “compromised access to wild places and generated an inordinate amount of negativity in the climbing community and beyond,” per the AP.

Potter eventually turned incorporated BASE jumping — i.e., jumping from buildings, antennas, spans, and earth — into his daredevil repertoire. In 2009, he completed the longest BASE jump on record after leaping from the Eiger North Face in Switzerland and flying in a wingsuit for 2 minutes, 50 seconds. For pulling off such a feat, National Geographic named Potter one of its Adventurers of the Year.

In 2014, the energy food company Clif Bar dropped its sponsorship of five daring climbers, Honnold and Potter included. Clif Bar said in a statement at the time it “no longer [felt] good benefitting from the amount of risk certain athletes are taking in areas of the sport where there is no margin for error, where there is no safety net,” Climbing reported.

Potter also sparked controversy by doing high-line walks and parachute jumps with his dog, Whisper. He chronicled his and Whisper’s adventures in a 22-minute film called When Dogs Fly, which he released in 2014 to outcry from animal rights activists, according to BBC News.

Potter died in a BASE jumping accident in 2015.

Potter, then 42, and his climbing partner Graham Hunt, then 29, died on May 16, 2015, during a wingsuit flight at Yosemite, as the AP reported at the time.

The two men’s spotter lost contact with them after they jumped from a 7,500-foot promontory called Taft Point. An overnight search was unsuccessful, but a helicopter crew spotted Potter and Hunt’s bodies in Yosemite Valley the next morning.

Potter and Hunt made their wingsuit flight attempt around nightfall, perhaps to avoid authorities, since BASE jumping is illegal in U.S. national parks, according to the AP.

Even so, park ranger Scott Gediman had high praise for Potter and Hunt, whom he said were prominent figures in Yosemite’s climbing community. “This is a horrible incident, and our deepest sympathies go out to their friends and family,” Gediman told the AP. “This is a huge loss for all of us.”

Mike Gauthier, chief of staff for Yosemite, later told the Los Angeles Times that Potter and Hunt were attempting to clear a “notch” — a ridgeline that’s “spiny like a stegosaurus” — but hit the rock instead.

The Dark Wizard filmmakers wanted to show the “complexity” and “contradictory layers” of a larger-than-life climber.

The Dark Wizard documentarians Nick Rosen and Peter Mortimer were friends with Potter, according to the Los Angeles Times, and they were committed to presenting an honest depiction of the climber.

“Dean was this larger-than-life icon in the climbing world, but we did not want to make a hagiography,” Rosen told the newspaper. “We wanted to peel back these contradictory layers — he wants to be pure, but he has an egoic need for public glory — and show these things do battle with each other inside him.”

Mortimer added that the documentary delves into Potter’s complexity — “his complex relationship with climbing, with his own motivations, with his friends” — and that he and Rosen had to tell the story when the time was right.

“It was valuable to wait long enough that even these crusty Gen X dudes are looking back through a lens of sensitivity around mental health, abusive relationships, and the toxic machismo that was taken for granted and almost celebrated at a certain time,” Rosen explained. “We caught them at a moment when they could look back with a nuanced perspective.”

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And as for mental health, Rosen said that Potter was living with a “pretty serious mental illness” that was undiagnosed and unmedicated. Because of their personal connection to Potter, the late climber’s sister gave Rosen and Mortimer his personal journals. And those journals gave the documentarians more insight into Potter’s mind.

“His mental health struggles are so connected with his need to do these incredible, beautiful things,” Mortimer said.

Added Rosen, “Given the cards that Dean was dealt in a time before people were more literate about mental health, and despite the pain he caused other people, at least he was able to make a beautiful ride out of his life.”

The Dark Wizard, Docuseries Premiere, Tuesday, April 14, 9/8c, HBO