- 2 days ago
What you're about to watch is something BASE jumping has never seen in the entire history of the sport. Not once. 2026’s first BASE jumping deaths are nearly unbelievable.
Welcome to the extreme edge.
-------------------------------------------------------
Watch More:
His Sherpa Filmed Him Alive. Then He Fell Off K2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrZlZo1VLPs
The Coward of Everest: The Lie That Fooled the World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWzNsfjafJI&t=648s
-------------------------------------------------------
More eXtreme Stories - Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@TheExtreme-Edge
Every month there's a story that never goes on YouTube. You'll find it here: patreon.com/c/TheeXtreme
For business inquiries only - extremeedgeinfo@gmail.com
Voiceover: https://jessegvoiceactor.com/
Welcome to the extreme edge.
-------------------------------------------------------
Watch More:
His Sherpa Filmed Him Alive. Then He Fell Off K2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrZlZo1VLPs
The Coward of Everest: The Lie That Fooled the World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWzNsfjafJI&t=648s
-------------------------------------------------------
More eXtreme Stories - Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@TheExtreme-Edge
Every month there's a story that never goes on YouTube. You'll find it here: patreon.com/c/TheeXtreme
For business inquiries only - extremeedgeinfo@gmail.com
Voiceover: https://jessegvoiceactor.com/
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00What you're about to watch is something base jumping has never seen in the entire history of the sport.
00:06Not once.
00:072026's first base jumping deaths are nearly unbelievable.
00:12Welcome to the Extreme Edge.
00:19On June 14, 2026, a small group arrived at this remote stretch of canyon country about 30 miles from Moab,
00:29Utah.
00:30Called Mineral Bottom.
00:31They had come for a base jump, the closest thing man has to flying like a bird.
00:37And one of the men gearing up, preparing to soar that very morning, was Danny Joe Kregel.
00:43Danny wasn't new to the sky.
00:45He had over 100 solo skydives under his belt.
00:49He understood risk and parachutes well enough.
00:52But you can never be too careful, especially when you're doing what Danny was about to do.
00:57So, as a professional who knows his limits, he found another professional as a guide.
01:03The best one money could buy.
01:05Andy Lewis.
01:07That morning, around 8 a.m., the desert light was still soft.
01:11The morning air in the canyon was still calm.
01:15Somewhere in Arizona, Danny's family was looking at a selfie he'd sent them of himself smiling,
01:21about to check off a goal he'd carried for years.
01:24Danny got harnessed up.
01:26And if past clients are anything to go by, we have a pretty good picture of what that looked like.
01:32One man who jumped with his guide, Andy Lewis, said he would explain every piece of the harness
01:37and make sure every buckle was checked and checked tight before finally connecting himself
01:42to the back of the rig, methodically as always.
01:45The two men walked to the edge with Danny on the front and Andy behind them,
01:50and a harness system connecting them from chest to back.
01:53One parachute on Andy's back with its extraction line ready at the exit point.
01:58Below them, 280 feet down, was a slope of broken sandstone the locals call talus.
02:05Then they jumped.
02:07The extraction line snapped tight behind them.
02:10The container on Andy's back tore open.
02:13The parachute streamed out into the morning air right on schedule.
02:17And for that first second, Danny Kragel was getting exactly what he paid $999 for.
02:24The floor of the world dropped away, and the canyon walls rose around him,
02:28glowing red in the early light.
02:30The wind was starting to build in his ears,
02:33and Danny felt the thrill that only flying like a bird can give you.
02:37It was routine.
02:38It was calm.
02:39It was, in every visible way, a morning like any other of the hundreds that came before it.
02:46There was nothing in that moment that suggested this jump would be any different from the last
02:51thousand that Andy had made.
02:53No gust of wind.
02:54No warning.
02:55Danny was safe with one of the most experienced base jumpers in America strapped to his back.
03:01You may not recognize his name, but if you watched Madonna's Super Bowl halftime show in 2012,
03:06you've already seen him, you just don't know.
03:09He was the man in the white toga, bouncing and flipping on a one-inch line while Madonna sang just
03:15behind him, right in front of 114 million people.
03:19Most of them had no idea they were watching a man who'd go on to redefine what a human body
03:25could survive.
03:26But the man on that stage wasn't performing a trick.
03:29He was doing, in front of the entire country, the same thing he'd been doing his whole life.
03:35Walking a line between control and catastrophe and making it look effortless.
03:41And even entertaining.
03:43Danny was trusting Andy with his life for a reason.
03:47Years before this cliff, before this canyon, long before Andy even strapped a parachute to his back,
03:54he'd already become obsessed with something that sounds almost too ridiculous to be a real sport.
04:00Imagine stretching a strip of webbing barely wider than your thumb between two anchor points,
04:05then trying to walk across it.
04:08This is called slacklining.
04:09And for you and me, simply making it from one end of the anchor point to another without falling is
04:14an achievement.
04:15But Andy asked,
04:22Andy did that as a college kid from Marin County, California, in 2004 when he dislocated his shoulder on a
04:31climbing trip.
04:32Most people rest from an injury like that.
04:35Andy strung a line up near his home and started walking on it while his arm healed.
04:39Within a year, it was a hobby.
04:41Within two, it was his entire life.
04:44And in a few years, he took what maybe 70 people knew into something millions came to love
04:50when he won his first slackline world championship ever held in 2008.
04:55Then, Andy took that one step further.
04:58Because if walking a slackline on the ground was difficult,
05:02what happens if you stretch one across a canyon with hundreds of feet of empty air beneath you?
05:07I mean, you don't have to be Einstein to know that one mistake,
05:10one gust of wind, or misplaced step at those heights, and that's the end.
05:15For most people, that's just too much risk.
05:18Andy wasn't most people.
05:20He moonwalked on lines rigged 480 feet between casino towers above Las Vegas.
05:25He didn't even stop there.
05:27This man walked on lines strung between hot air balloons 4,000 feet in the air.
05:33And more than a hundred times, yes, a hundred times, he crossed high lines with no leash and no harness.
05:41So, to ensure one bad step doesn't turn fatal, he started wearing a base parachute while slacklining.
05:47The idea was that if he slipped, he'd jump, deploy the parachute, and hope he'd left himself enough room for
05:54it to open.
05:55He called it base lining.
05:57And while it honestly sounds like something out of a James Bond movie, well, it clearly worked.
06:02It also earned him a name.
06:04Because other professional risk-takers, people whose own mothers think they're insane,
06:10watched this man walk untethered lines with a parachute as his only plan B and decided he was the crazy
06:17one.
06:18They started calling him Sketchy Andy.
06:20One fellow jumper said he had a reputation for leaping into tighter spaces and pulling his parachute later than anyone
06:26else would dare.
06:28Despite that nickname, people who actually worked with Andy found him one of the most careful and methodical men in
06:35the sport.
06:36And eventually, people weren't just watching his stunts anymore.
06:39They were asking,
06:40Can you teach me?
06:41For years, the answer was usually no.
06:43And to understand why, you need to know what base jumping actually is.
06:48Skydivers, skydivers jump out of airplanes.
06:51Base jumpers instead just jump off tall things.
06:55Buildings, antenna towers, bridges, and cliffs.
06:58That's the whole sport.
07:00It might not seem very different from skydiving, but removing the airplane removes something else.
07:06Time.
07:07A skydiver leaves the plane at an altitude high enough so that the jumper has enough time to fix almost
07:13anything if something goes wrong.
07:15Like deploying a reserve parachute if the main one fails.
07:19A base jumper stepping off a cliff has just a few seconds of flight and one parachute.
07:24Just one.
07:25Because there's simply not enough altitude to deploy a second one.
07:29Everything has to go exactly right with the parachute.
07:32If it fails, well, that's it.
07:34But you can see why you just can't spend a weekend learning it.
07:38Most jumpers build up the nerve for a base jump over hundreds of skydives, years of training, and countless hours
07:45learning how to position their body and read the winds.
07:47But Andy thought there was another way.
07:50What if people didn't have to spend years learning?
07:53What if they could borrow someone else's experience instead?
07:57So in 2018, he launched a company called Base Jump Moab, built around exactly that idea.
08:04Instead of spending years becoming a base jumper, you could arrive in Moab on a Friday, meet Andy on Saturday
08:10morning, and a few hours later, step off a cliff with one of the most experienced base jumpers in America
08:16strapped to your back.
08:17He would carry the experience.
08:19You'd just come along for the ride.
08:21Experience an adventure worth telling the grandkids about.
08:24And before you say, hey, that sounds completely reckless, you should know Andy was one of the very few people
08:31in the country with close to a thousand base jumps under his belt.
08:34A thousand.
08:35He had earned the right to have hundreds of strangers who had trusted him with those few seconds, and each
08:41time, that stranger walked away with the story of a lifetime.
08:45His company had taken up clients from six years old to over 80.
08:49By the time most people his age were starting careers, Andy had already built one out of a sport that
08:55barely existed.
08:56And it wasn't some underground operation either.
09:00Authorities, in May 2026, formally authorized him as a commercial tandem base jumper.
09:06Andy Lewis was running a permitted, federally reviewed business with a perfect record, the safest in the game.
09:13Which was exactly what Danny Joe Craigle was looking for.
09:16Which brings us back to that morning.
09:18Back to the canyon.
09:19Back to the two men in free fall.
09:21When Danny stepped off that cliff with Andy on his back, he wasn't taking a chance on a stranger.
09:27He was taking a chance on maybe the safest bet in the sport.
09:31And for one second, that bet was paying off.
09:35Nothing was supposed to go wrong.
09:37And that's exactly what makes what happened next so difficult to understand.
09:43As Danny was enjoying this experience, above them, a canopy bloomed nearly a thousand times before.
09:49All anyone watching up to this moment would be seeing was a jump like any other.
09:55Up above the two falling men, the canopy cells were beginning to fill with air.
10:00Its lines were stretching out under load.
10:02In a normal jump, this is the instant where fabric transforms into a wing and falling turns into flying.
10:11Except this time, somewhere in that transformation, it stopped.
10:15The canopy came out, but it never finished opening.
10:19Nobody watching you could tell you the exact moment it became clear.
10:24Maybe it hung there half-formed for a heartbeat.
10:27Maybe the shape was wrong from the first breath of air.
10:30But at some point, in that second, the thing above Andy and Danny stopped being a parachute in progress and
10:38became something else.
10:40Just fabric.
10:41Fabric carrying two men accelerating past 50 miles per hour.
10:45And fabric slows almost nothing.
10:49If this were a normal skydive at around, say, 13,000 feet, they would have nearly a full minute of
10:55freefall.
10:56So, given their main parachute's failure, Andy would have simply cut it away and opened a reserve.
11:02But the cliff Andy and Danny just stepped off of is only about 280 feet tall.
11:08They had roughly three, maybe four seconds before reaching the ground.
11:12And there was nothing to slow them down.
11:15I thought a lot about what Andy might have thought of at this moment.
11:19This is a man who once had a parachute open backwards and slam him into a cliff wall and survived
11:25it.
11:25If anyone alive could diagnose a dying canopy by feel in real time, it was him.
11:30Which means Andy Lewis almost certainly knew something had gone catastrophically wrong.
11:36He just didn't have the altitude to do anything about it.
11:39At the third second, there was no parachute.
11:42No reserve.
11:44And even if there had been, it would have been useless here.
11:47There was nothing Andy could do.
11:49Whatever happens next is simply what happens.
11:52And just like that, the two men struck the talus slope at the base of the cliff.
11:58At the cliff, Andy's crew and close friends had just watched the whole thing happen because a tandem jump takes
12:04more than two people.
12:05Someone has to handle that line at the edge.
12:08And Andy always jumped off with his team.
12:10For them, the whole accident, from stepping off the cliff to hitting the rocks below, took maybe five seconds.
12:17About as long as it takes to skip a YouTube ad.
12:20One of the men standing on that cliff was Jimmy Peterson, Andy's business partner and his close friend of 14
12:26years.
12:27Another was Brent Kane, a friend of Andy's who happened to work as an EMT and firefighter.
12:32And when they saw their friend, who never fell, slam the rock with his client, they didn't hesitate.
12:39Jimmy Peterson went over the edge right after their friends.
12:42Not jumping, but scrambling.
12:44Climbing down the cliff and then down that slope of loose, broken sandstone,
12:48moving as fast as the terrain would allow toward the two motionless figures below.
12:52But what he found when he reached them made this morning crueler than any clean ending could have been.
12:59Remember, a tandem rig works with the client riding out in front of the harness and the pilot on the
13:04back.
13:05That means Danny's body was out facing the world, with Andy's body behind his.
13:10It's the standard setup he had used for all his clients.
13:13So when the pair struck that slope of jagged sandstone at over 50 miles per hour,
13:18the two men did not meet the rocks equally.
13:21Danny Joe Craigle, the magician to his granddaughter,
13:24the man who had sent his family a smiling selfie a few hours earlier,
13:29sadly got the full force of the impact.
13:32He passed away instantly.
13:34For a moment, high above them, his crew must have believed they'd just lost them both.
13:40But Andy Lewis was still alive.
13:42At least for now.
13:44The fall took five seconds, but what followed was three hours of agony.
13:49And what should have happened next was something trauma doctors called the golden hour.
13:54One of the oldest rules in emergency medicine is that a person with catastrophic injuries
13:58has their best chance of survival if they reach an operating room within 60 minutes of the impact.
14:04That's why ambulances race through traffic and why medical helicopters exist,
14:09because every minute inside that hour is, well, golden.
14:13And if Andy had hit those rocks in downtown Salt Lake City,
14:17a trauma team might have reached him in 15 minutes.
14:20Even in most of rural America, probably 30 to 40 minutes tops.
14:24But Andy crashed at Mineral Bottom, Utah.
14:27This place is one of the last true dead zones in America.
14:31No cell signal or radio reaches here.
14:33And there are over 30 miles of canyon road between those rocks in the outside world.
14:38So even as Jimmy reached the two men, they knew the horrifying truth at the back of their minds.
14:44Nobody was coming because nobody else even knew an accident had happened.
14:49But Andy was still alive.
14:51They had to do something.
14:52So the crew split the impossible job in two.
14:56Jimmy Peterson stayed at his best friend's side with the others,
14:59doing everything they could medically for Andy, which was not very much.
15:03And Brent Kane, besides being Andy's friend, was also an EMT and firefighter.
15:08He knew that no amount of first aid on that canyon floor was going to replace a trauma surgeon.
15:13The most valuable thing a trained medic could do was to find urgent help immediately.
15:17So he got behind the wheel and drove hard up the canyon road to civilization.
15:22His eyes flicked between the road and a phone screen as he drove,
15:26waiting, begging, pleading for a single bar of signal to appear.
15:31Every second on that canyon floor was the second the golden hour clock kept running,
15:36whether anyone down there could see it or not.
15:39And somewhere up on that plateau, after minutes of frantic driving,
15:43he finally entered signal range.
15:46Kane called 911.
15:48When the dispatcher in Grand County heard for the first time what had happened at Mineral Bottom that morning,
15:53the response was amazing.
15:55Grand County Sheriff's deputies started toward the canyon.
15:58Grand County Search and Rescue and all volunteer team of climbers were mobilized too.
16:02Ground Emergency Medical Services rolled with them.
16:05And because everyone on that dispatch understood what fall-from-height remote canyon means,
16:10two medical helicopters with flying intensive care units were mobilized.
16:14On paper, that is a massive response.
16:18Roughly 45 minutes after Kane's call connected, help reached the scene.
16:22And for a location like Mineral Bottom, 45 minutes is genuinely fast.
16:26But emergencies don't measure time from the moment you call for help.
16:30They measure it from the moment everything goes wrong.
16:33The scramble down the cliff and Kane's drive out for the signal cost precious time.
16:37By the time trained hands finally reached him, the most important hour of his life had already slipped away.
16:44Medics went to work on that slope anyway with oxygen and advanced trauma care.
16:49Everything they had, and Andy fought with them.
16:51He held on for around three hours, but the trauma was just too much.
16:56At approximately 11 a.m., June 14, 2026, on the rocks beneath the cliff he had jumped hundreds of times
17:04with his best friend of 14 years beside him,
17:06Andy Lewis died at the scene.
17:08He was 39 years old.
17:10The news reached Moab before the helicopters were back on their pads.
17:15By evening, it was everywhere.
17:16And everyone who read it was asking the same question you're asking right now.
17:21What went wrong?
17:22As of the time of making this video, no official cause has been released.
17:26No completed investigation or equipment findings.
17:29No autopsy results have been made public.
17:32Andy's own company went quiet too.
17:34Because the investigation was ongoing and the people closest to him needed space.
17:39So while the official said nothing, the people who actually understood this sport went to work.
17:45You should know that since 1981, the base jumping community has recorded every single death in this sport.
17:50And each one gets taken apart by the living, detail by detail.
17:55It's not because they're fascinated by death, but because that's how people in this sport stay alive.
18:00They'd need to record and understand the cause of each death and hopefully prevent it from happening again.
18:05It sounds grim, but it's also the only safety system the sport's ever had.
18:10And within hours, that machine returned toward mineral bottom.
18:14Jumpers who'd had decades in this sport, who'd flown that exact cliff,
18:17began working through every known detail of those three seconds.
18:21Some wondered whether the deployment sequence itself had gone wrong.
18:24Others questioned whether something happened in the first fraction of a second after leaving the cliff.
18:29And there is still no consensus.
18:31People with decades of experience in packed parachutes thousands of times cannot say this was what Andy did wrong.
18:38I actually think that's the most unsettling part of this entire story.
18:42Because how do you learn from an accident that shouldn't have even happened?
18:45And that's not the only disturbing thing about this story.
18:48Because while the jumpers dug through those three seconds, others were asking a simpler question.
18:53When was the last time a tandem base jump killed the people on it?
18:57Surely, in a sport this deadly, it's happened before.
19:00So, they went back through the list of recorded deaths, but not one of them.
19:05Not one was a tandem base jump.
19:07In the entire recorded history of the sport, it had never happened.
19:11June 14th, 2026 is widely believed, and I'll be careful here,
19:15because no official body certifies this kind of record,
19:18to be the first time the commercial side of this deadliest air sport on Earth had a fatality.
19:23And the man who broke that record was the man who had done more to build it than anyone alive.
19:28Maybe that's why, almost as quickly as people began asking what happened,
19:33they started asking something else.
19:35Should this kind of jump exist at all?
19:38Because Andy Lewis was a paying customer on a base jump.
19:41And for some people, that changes everything,
19:44because long before June 14th,
19:46the base community itself had problems with what Andy was selling.
19:49Some even specifically called tandem base the stupidest thing in the world.
19:54And it was not because they hated Andy.
19:56Many of them were close flying buddies from way back.
19:59They definitely respected him enormously.
20:01But they also believed that base jumping should be earned.
20:04In their opinion, a base jumper should spend years learning the basics
20:08and mastering the winds of the cliff they're about to jump off of.
20:11They should read the fatality list and know exactly what they're stepping into.
20:16A tandem passenger doesn't need to do all that.
20:19Danny, for example, had more than 100 skydives, which is impressive.
20:23But he'd never flown a base canopy, ever.
20:25So he probably had no idea in those very brief moments what went wrong.
20:29He just signed a waiver, paid $999, and more or less placed his life in another man's hands.
20:36His entire understanding of the risk was essentially that Andy had done this a thousand times.
20:41But then again, remember, Andy had done it a thousand times.
20:45This operation had run for nearly eight years.
20:48The federal government looked at this exact operation and put its stamp on it.
20:51Six-year-olds had gone home safe.
20:54Eighty-year-olds had gone home safe.
20:56And some clients walked away with more than a story.
20:59One woman who jumped with Andy after her mother's death wrote that he
21:03helped heal my heart and I was hurting.
21:05And Andy's own partner, Haley Ashburn, gave the plaintiff's defense of all after his death.
21:11She never claimed this sport was safe.
21:13Nobody in base jumping claims that.
21:15She said everyone has the right to take whatever risk they want to take
21:18and that Andy would have fought for that right until his last breath.
21:21And he did.
21:22If the question was simply, can tandem base jumping be done safely?
21:26Then Andy Lewis had spent almost a decade answering yes.
21:31Until one Sunday morning in June, it wasn't.
21:34The tributes for Andy came from everywhere.
21:37Thomas Huber, one of the most famous mountaineers alive, called him the wildest among us.
21:42Jimmy Peterson, the friend who scrambled down that slope and stayed at his side until the end,
21:46was heartbroken. But it was the family of the man who trusted Andy with his life that gave the
21:51most stunning response of all. Because everyone knew what came next when a paying client dies in
21:56a commercial operation. Lawyers get involved and lawsuits follow. Somebody gets blamed.
22:02That's the pattern we've come to expect. Except that's not what happened here.
22:06Danny's wife, Kelly, publicly said she didn't blame Andy.
22:09She understood the risks her husband had accepted before he ever stepped onto that cliff.
22:14This wasn't negligence in her eyes. It was just a tragedy. She'd lost the man she'd spent 43 years
22:20with. Danny left behind two daughters as well. He wasn't trying to become the next extreme sports
22:25star. He was 68 years old, an accomplished businessman from Arizona with a lifelong dream.
22:30His family described him as someone with a wonderful sense of humor who lightened up every
22:34room he entered. His favorite thing in the whole world was performing magic tricks with his
22:39granddaughter. But Andy's family had lost a son, a friend, a partner. They saw no point in creating
22:46a third tragedy in a courtroom. I think that's an extraordinary amount of grace. Because it's one
22:51thing to accept risk when everything goes right. It's something else entirely to accept it after the
22:57person you love never comes home. Hours before the jump, Andy posted one final video. A flipping dive
23:04into a red rock canyon, testing a rope swing stoked for the season ahead. He thanked the drone operators
23:10and signed it off with this sentence. What a journey it's been, and it's only just begun. He had no
23:17idea
23:17his career was about to end. Andy Lewis spent 20 years proving that skill could hold death at arm's
23:23length. And for nearly a thousand strangers who trusted him with three seconds of their lives,
23:28it did. Every single time, but once. This was not a story about someone doing something reckless.
23:34It was a story about two people who did everything right, and it still wasn't enough. In our next
23:40story, a Sherpa on K2 points his camera at his climbing partner, a scientist descending a wall of ice,
23:47calm, in control, doing everything right. Then he pans away to film the mountains. Seconds later,
23:53he pans back. The rope is still there. The man is not. Don't miss this next video.
Comments