Sean Leary, 1975–2014

last updated 8 January 2015

To adrenaline junkie Sean Leary, nothing could match the thrill of leaping off a cliff in a wing suit—a piece of equipment that allows BASE jumpers to glide through the air before releasing parachutes that slow their descent. “There’s a second of absolute freedom. You’re floating in the air,” he said. “You feel like, ‘This is what birds must see.’”

Born in California, Leary fell in love with climbing as a teenager, said the Los Angeles Times. He specialized in speed climbing and in 2010 ascended the vertical southern face of El Capitan, a 3,000-foot granite monolith in Yosemite National Park, in a record 2 hours and 36 minutes. But it was tragedy that brought Leary to BASE jumping. After his girlfriend, Brazilian climber Roberta Nunes, died in his arms in a car crash in 2006, Leary started jumping off cliffs to remind himself that he was alive. In 2009, he packed Nunes’s ashes into a parachute and leaped off a remote Patagonian mountain that she loved, releasing her ashes “in a cathartic puff of white.”

Leary’s pursuit of ever-greater buzzes made him one of the country’s greatest BASE jumpers, said the San Francisco Chronicle. “It was also what killed him.” The 38-year-old’s body was recovered in Zion National Park in Utah, 300 feet beneath a high ridge that Leary had jumped from. It is thought that he clipped a rock wall on the way down. Friends said that Leary was aware of the risks of BASE jumping, but that nothing else could match the high that the sport provided. “When he was flying,” said his sister, Erin Martin, “it was the happiest point of his life.”