Utah canyon BASE jump kills 2, including daredevil athlete who performed
with Madonna
[June 16, 2026]
By RUSS BYNUM
A weekend BASE jumping accident in a Utah canyon killed two people, one
of them a daredevil athlete best known for performing onstage with
Madonna at the 2012 Super Bowl, authorities said.
The sheriff's office in Grand County, Utah, confirmed one of the dead
was Andy Lewis, an extreme athlete known for feats in BASE jumping, a
dangerous sport that involves parachuting to the ground after jumping
from a tall fixed object such as a building, a bridge or a desert cliff
overlooking a deep canyon.
The victims 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 to
inexperienced customers who would be harnessed to a guide wearing the
parachute. 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.”
Grand County Sheriff Jamison Wiggins confirmed the other person who was
killed was Danny Joe Kregle, a 68-year-old father and grandfather who
was described by a family member as an accomplished businessman.
“Danny had a wonderful sense of humor and was always looking for ways to
make people laugh,” relative Sydney Laverty told The Times-Independent.
“One of his greatest joys was performing magic tricks alongside his
granddaughter.”
Lewis' other sport made him an overnight celebrity, thanks to Madonna
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 went from obscure athlete to overnight celebrity when he appeared
onstage in Madonna’s 2012 Super Bowl halftime show. Dressed in a Roman
toga, Lewis bounced and executed tricks on his inch-wide line like it
was a trampoline while Madonna sang behind him.
“My phone actually rang itself to death three days in a row,” Lewis said
soon afterward in an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s late night show.
Emergency responders were dispatched Sunday to a report of people
injured in a BASE jumping attempt at Mineral Bottom, a remote desert
area near the Utah-Colorado line, according to the sheriff's office.
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U.S. slackliner Andy Lewis of Calif. balances on a slackline in
Bangkok, Thailand, July 23, 2014. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit, File)
BASE jumping is far more dangerous than skydiving
Though there's no official tally of BASE jumping deaths, a list
compiled by the website BASEaddict.com shows 540 total fatalities
worldwide since 1981 — including 30 people killed last year.
Prominent deaths include BASE jumper Dean Potter and his climbing
partner, Graham Hunt, who were killed in 2015 while attempting a
wingsuit flight in California's Yosemite National Park.
A study focused on BASE jumping in Norway, published in a medical
journal in 2007, estimated that BASE jumping carried risks of injury
or death five to eight times greater than skydiving.
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.'”
No one immediately returned phone, text and Facebook messages left
Monday for BASE Jump Moab.
Lewis won four straight world championships in competitive
slacklining from 2008 through 2011. Lewis set a Guinness World
Record for slackline surfing, swaying his feet side to side in a
rocking motion that mimics surfing, while keeping his balance above
China's Diaoshuilou waterfall in 2011.
In 2014, he walked a slackline suspended between two hot air
balloons more than 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) above the Nevada
desert.
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