In HBO’s “The Dark Wizard,” Dean Potter Climbs On
The morning before Dean Potter died, in May, 2015, he and his girlfriend, Jennifer Rapp, were puttering around their house in Yosemite. Potter, the world-famous rock climber and daredevil, had just returned from a trip to Germany, and Rapp had flown in from Vancouver, the headquarters of the apparel company Arc’teryx, where she was head of communications. In the living room, Rapp tried on some dresses for Potter. “Help me pick one,” she said.
They were scheduled to fly the next morning to New York, to attend a gala where he was to receive something called an Action Maverick Award. Potter disliked New York, and cities in general, and planned on staying just one night, but he was uncommonly excited about this particular honor, because it recognized him as an artist. Recently, he’d been trying, mostly in vain, to convince the world, and himself, that he performed vertiginous feats—free soloing on El Capitan, highlining over Yosemite Falls, BASE jumping in a wingsuit off the Eiger—not to stoke his ego or his reputation but, instead, to express an elegant swashbuckling concord with the natural world. Having been surpassed, as an athlete, by Alex Honnold, the new free soloist in the valley, Potter, then in his early forties, reimagined himself as a performance artist, of a kind. The Maverick Award was a validation.
Potter helped Rapp choose a dress: one by Missoni, with bright colors. A friend, Graham Hunt, Potter’s wingsuiting sidekick, was due to drop by to do tree work on land they’d bought nearby, but, preferring to chill out alone with Rapp, Potter left a message telling him not to come. Hunt didn’t get that message, though, and turned up soon afterward. “That changed the course of our day,” Rapp said recently. “We wouldn’t have hung out with Graham, and Dean wouldn’t have died.” Not on that day, anyway.
That afternoon, Potter, Rapp, and Hunt hiked out to Taft Point, a prow of granite overlooking Yosemite Valley. In their flying-squirrel suits, Hunt and Potter jumped off a promontory and swooped toward a ridge with a slot in it called the Notch. They didn’t make it. Rapp, up on Taft Point, heard two thuds. A recovery team found the bodies in the Notch the next day.
The accident in the Notch is the climax of “The Dark Wizard,” a new four-part HBO documentary about Potter and his demons. The film’s directors, Nick Rosen and Peter Mortimer, and its co-creator Josh Lowell, also made “The Alpinist,” in 2021, about another doomed mountain man, and they produce Reel Rock, a perennial travelling festival of climbing films, so they’re accustomed to tragic endings. Still, the latest film, owing to Potter’s emotional turbulence and some of the wreckage he left behind, was the most fraught project they’ve taken on.
A few days after Potter died, Rapp received an e-mail from the woman behind the Maverick Awards, a choreographer named Elizabeth Streb. Potter and Rapp had first met her at the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival, where she was promoting Catherine Gund’s movie about her, “Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity.” Streb’s work incorporates what she called “extreme action,” a lot of falling and crashing into things. She and Potter hit it off.
“He, like me, believed he could fly, and dedicated his life to that proposition,” Streb said the other day. “We have a theory of the real move—it’s one that once initiated you can’t stop. We specialize in letting the ground stop us and training our bodies to take the hit. There’s no such thing as perfect safety. There is only preparing and training.”
The night after Potter died, Streb, at her gala, presented his award in absentia. “I am gathering everything together for you,” she wrote afterward, in her e-mail to Rapp. “The Award itself, with his name and an inscription”; also, “a video we put together of his work [and] a video of an ‘Action’ my dancers performed for him called ‘Head First’ and a few photos of the Evening.”
Rapp, in her desolation, never replied, so she never got to see the award or the videos. They haven’t spoken since. Rapp doesn’t have the dress anymore. ♦