A weekend BASE jumping accident at a remote Utah canyon killed two people, including Andy Lewis, the extreme athlete who famously bounced across an inch-wide slackline during Madonna's 2012 Super Bowl halftime show. The Grand County Sheriff's Office confirmed Lewis and 68-year-old Danny Joe Kregle died after a tandem BASE jump went wrong at Mineral Bottom, a desolate stretch of desert near the Utah-Colorado line.
Emergency responders were dispatched Sunday to a report of people injured in a BASE jumping attempt at the site, CBS News reported. Grand County Sheriff Jamison Wiggins identified Kregle as the second victim. No details about the exact failure mechanism have been released.
Aerial Arts Moab, an acrobatics company Lewis co-owned, posted on Facebook that its "co-owner and best friend Andy passed away in a tandem BASE accident." A tandem jump harnesses two people together, typically pairing an inexperienced participant with a guide wearing the parachute. Lewis also owned BASE Jump Moab, a company that offered exactly that kind of experience to paying customers.
Lewis was no weekend hobbyist. He won four consecutive world championships in competitive slacklining from 2008 through 2011. That same year he set a Guinness World Record for slackline surfing above China's Diaoshuilou waterfall. In 2014, he walked a slackline strung between two hot air balloons more than 4,000 feet above the Nevada desert.
His biggest mainstream moment came on Feb. 5, 2012, when he performed during Madonna's halftime show at Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis, bouncing and executing tricks on his line while Madonna sang behind him. The game featured the New York Giants and New England Patriots. Lewis appeared on Conan O'Brien's late-night show soon afterward.
John McEvoy, a BASE jumping instructor in Twin Falls, Idaho, who said he had jumped with Lewis, described a man of rare physical gifts who routinely tested the outer limits of what the sport allowed.
"He had an incredible level of athleticism and skill that was developed over years of practice. But then he would take an incredible amount of risk."
McEvoy's assessment captures a tension that runs through the entire BASE jumping community. The sport, which involves parachuting from fixed objects like cliffs, bridges, and buildings, operates in a space where the margin for error is measured in seconds and feet rather than minutes and miles.
What makes this incident particularly sobering is the tandem format. BASE Jump Moab offered tandem jumps to inexperienced customers who would be harnessed to a guide wearing the parachute. The exact roles Lewis and Kregle occupied during the fatal jump remain unclear. Authorities have not said whether Kregle was a customer, a student, a fellow guide, or something else entirely.
That gap matters. If a paying customer died harnessed to a professional guide, the questions about commercial tandem BASE jumping grow sharper. If both were experienced jumpers, the calculus shifts. The Grand County Sheriff's Office has not released an incident report or indicated which agency, if any, is investigating.
Tragic adventure-sport fatalities are not confined to Utah canyons. A young woman was killed in Brazil after rope-jump guides threw her from a bridge without attaching her safety gear, a case that raised hard questions about operator accountability in extreme recreation.
BASE jumping has always been frank about its body count. BASEaddict.com maintains a running tally showing 540 fatalities worldwide since 1981, including 30 people killed last year alone. A 2007 medical journal study focused on BASE jumping in Norway estimated the sport carries injury or death risks five to eight times greater than skydiving.
Lewis himself seemed to understand the arithmetic. In an interview with documentary filmmaker Ella Warnick published last year, he offered a remarkably candid reflection on the toll.
"It's weird to think about how many people are dead, because it's like a normal thing."
He was not exaggerating. In 2015, well-known BASE jumper Dean Potter and his climbing partner Graham Hunt were killed while attempting a wingsuit flight in California's Yosemite National Park. The list of prominent names lost to the sport grows steadily.
Sudden, unexpected deaths have a way of forcing difficult conversations, whether in remote Utah canyons or on foreign safari lodges where circumstances remain murky.
The second man killed deserves more than a footnote. Danny Joe Kregle was a 68-year-old father and grandfather described by family as an accomplished businessman with a gift for making people laugh.
Sydney Laverty, a relative, told The Times-Independent about the man behind the name:
"Danny had a wonderful sense of humor and was always looking for ways to make people laugh. One of his greatest joys was performing magic tricks alongside his granddaughter."
That portrait, a grandfather who did magic tricks for his granddaughter, sits uneasily beside the image of a tandem BASE jump off a desert cliff. How Kregle came to be harnessed to Lewis on that canyon rim is a question his family and the public deserve to have answered.
Cases involving people found dead under unexpected circumstances, like an Indianapolis mother discovered dead in southern Mexico months after vanishing, remind us that the facts behind a death often emerge slowly and incompletely.
McEvoy, the Idaho-based instructor, acknowledged that tandem BASE jumping divides practitioners. He framed it bluntly:
"Within BASE, it's a very controversial topic. There's a lot of people who say it's the stupidest thing in the world and others arguing: 'No, we're giving people the experience of their lives.'"
That internal debate now has two more names attached to it. Lewis was famous enough that his death will draw attention the sport rarely receives. After his Super Bowl appearance, Lewis recalled the flood of interest: "My phone actually rang itself to death three days in a row." That spotlight returns now under far grimmer circumstances.
Phone, text, and Facebook messages left Monday for BASE Jump Moab went unanswered.
Key facts are still missing. The exact time of the incident has not been disclosed. The mechanical cause of the failed jump, whether a parachute malfunction, a deployment error, a collision, or something else, has not been described by authorities. No formal investigation has been publicly announced. And the precise relationship between Lewis and Kregle on that jump has not been clarified.
Those answers will determine whether this was a tragic miscalculation between two willing risk-takers or something that raises harder questions about a commercial operation selling danger to people who trusted a professional to bring them home alive.
When a sport's own practitioners call tandem jumping "the stupidest thing in the world," and a 68-year-old grandfather ends up dead on a canyon floor, the rest of us are entitled to ask whether anyone is minding the store.