The True Story Behind The Dark Wizard, HBO's Docuseries About Free Climber Dean Potter

The True Story Behind The Dark Wizard, HBO's Docuseries About Free Climber Dean Potter

On the evening of May 16, 2015, Dean Potter and fellow climber Graham Hunt stood atop Taft Point, a granite overlook thousands of feet above Yosemite Valley. Below them, the valley floor stretched into shadow. Far beneath the jump point was a narrow notch in a ridgeline, the kind of gap wingsuit flyers attempt to thread at speeds often exceeding 100 miles per hour. The margin for error was vanishingly small; so was the time they would have to correct it.

The men jumped. For roughly 15 seconds, Potter, then 43, and Hunt, 29, moved through open air in wingsuits, their bodies held aloft by fabric webbing stretched between their arms and legs. Then both struck the rock wall; neither deployed a parachute.

Both men died immediately upon impact. Hunt, a Yosemite local and Potter’s regular flying partner, had been regarded by those who knew him as a gifted wingsuit flyer, though during his five years in the sport, he remained largely outside the spotlight, known mostly within the Valley’s tight circles. But Potter’s death in many ways had been foreshadowed for years, not simply by the nature of wingsuit flying, among the most dangerous things a person can do, but by the logic Potter spent much of his life pursuing. He was a climber, highliner, and BASE jumper drawn to the place where fear and exaltation began to blur. That tension sits at the center of HBO’s four-part documentary series about him, The Dark Wizard, premiering April 14.