Extreme sports athlete Dean Potter’s longtime partner remembers seeing his “perfect body” moments after his death in a wingsuit flying accident.
Jen Rapp was at Yosemite National Park on that fateful day, as Potter and friend Graham Hunt attempted to clear the famed Notch at Taft Point in May 2015. Both crashed into rocks and died on impact. Potter was 43 and Hunt was 29.
“I just remember being told they’re both in the Notch and they’re both dead,” Rapp recalled in the final episode of HBO’s docuseries The Dark Wizard, which aired on Tuesday, May 5.. “I walk in the room, and they’re both in these black nylon bags, and I immediately took off all the s*** they put on him. His body was perfect. His head had been impacted, but there were no scrapes, there were no f***ing limbs sticking out.”
Rapp took viewers through Potter and Hunt’s final jump, explaining that it did not appear her partner had enough altitude to clear the Notch until, she thought, he finally made it when he disappeared from view.
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“Maybe he’s gonna go around the Notch,” she remembered thinking. “Maybe he doesn’t think they can make it….But Dean just keeps f***ing going and just before the Notch, Graham veers back right.”
She added, “It didn’t seem that Dean was high enough. He had a few seconds to decide, ‘Do I have the altitude? Do I feel good about this?’ Meanwhile, Graham is on track, but maybe he sees that Dean is too low.”
When she lost sight of them, Rapp said she heard a loud noise and expected to see their parachutes deploy. When she didn’t, she hurried to her car to get help.
At the time of his death, Potter was a legend in the rock climbing community, setting numerous free solo records and inventing the sport of FreeBASE, which combines free solo climbing with BASE jumping.
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Friends and fellow climbers, including Alex Honnold, who completed a free solo climb of skyscraper Taipei 101 in January, remembered Potter throughout the series. Filmmaker Brad Lynch, who worked closely with Potter before the two had a falling out, tearfully reflected on his friend’s death, which came before the two could make amends.
“People do things in their life that aren’t always right,” he said. “Sometimes you wreck relationships, sometimes you don’t make the right call, but when you get older, that’s the time for you to make amends.”
Lynch continued, “I really thought, as much as I knew he could die, I really hoped that he would get to that place and he would make it right. All he would have had to say was, ‘I forgive you. Can you forgive me?’ Just something like that. I just miss him.”
