# Daredevil athlete Andy Lewis dies in tandem BASE jump with client > Source: > Published: 2026-06-16 15:38:58+00:00 **Getting your** [Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...**By RUSS BYNUM, Associated Press** A BASE jumping accident in a Utah canyon killed two people, one of them a daredevil athlete who grew up in the Bay Area. The sheriff’s office in Grand County, Utah, confirmed one of the dead was Andy Lewis, 39, an extreme athlete known for feats in BASE jumping, parachuting from a fixed object such as a building or a cliff. The other was Danny Joe Kregle, a 68-year-old Arizona man who was described by a family member as a father, grandfather and accomplished businessman. Emergency responders were dispatched Sunday to Mineral Bottom, a remote desert area near the Utah-Colorado line, according to the sheriff’s office. The two had been conducting a tandem jump, in which two people are harnessed together, according to a social media post by Aerial Arts Moab, an acrobatics company that described Lewis as “co-owner and best friend.” Lewis also owned BASE Jump Moab, a business that offered tandem jumps. Promotional videos on the company’s website show pairs of people stepping off the edges of towering cliffs and briefly plummeting before their parachutes open. In BASE jumping circles, Lewis had a huge following and a reputation for pushing the envelope — leaping into tighter spaces or deploying his parachute later than his peers would dare, said John McEvoy, a BASE jumping instructor in Twin Falls, Idaho, who has jumped with Lewis. “He had an incredible level of athleticism and skill that was developed over years of practice,” McEvoy said. “But then he would take an incredible amount of risk.” Lewis was also a prominent figure in the niche sports of slacklining and tricklining, which combine elements of high-wire walking with aerial acrobatics — sometimes at perilous heights. He won four straight world championships in competitive slacklining, from 2008 through 2011. In 2014, he walked a slackline suspended between two hot air balloons more than 4,000 feet above the Nevada desert. Lewis was raised in the Marin County community of Greenbrae and also had lived in the Santa Rosa area. He attended Redwood High School in Larkspur and the College of Marin and graduated from Humboldt State University. He went from [obscure athlete to overnight celebrity](https://www.mercurynews.com/2012/02/07/bay-area-native-brings-slacklining-mainstream-with-super-bowl-show/) when he appeared onstage in Madonna’s 2012 Super Bowl halftime show, executing tricks on his inch-wide line. Though there’s no official tally of BASE jumping deaths, a list compiled by the website [BASEaddict.com](https://bfl.baseaddict.com/list) shows 540 total fatalities worldwide since 1981 — including 30 people killed last year. Prominent deaths include BASE jumper [Dean Potter](https://apnews.com/general-news-7304a1d7efd64eb68f170c494fc7679a) and his climbing partner, Graham Hunt, who were killed in 2015 while attempting a wingsuit flight in Yosemite National Park. The acronym refers to the jumping-off points: building, antenna, span, earth. Lewis openly acknowledged the sport’s inherent danger. “It’s weird to think about how many people are dead, because it’s like a normal thing,” Lewis told documentary filmmaker Ella Warnick in an interview published last year. Tandem BASE jumping carries additional risk because it straps together two people, one of whom generally lacks experience, under a single parachute, McEvoy said. But because they involve novices, they also tend to be the most low-risk, basic types of jumps. “Within BASE, it’s a very controversial topic,” McEvoy said. “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.’”