Image from Taft Point, Yosemite National Park. Photo: Frank Kovalchek/Flickr
It is being reported that Dean Potter’s GoPro was recording at the time of this accident and that the helmet-mountain camera captured his last moments before the accident.
Yosemite National Park officials are using the footage to investigate the cause of the BASE jumping accident that resulted in the deaths of Potter and fellow wingsuiter Graham Hunt.
Potter’s GoPro footage and still photos taken by observers are creating a clearer picture of what went wrong during their flight. Footage shot by Potter’s girlfriend, Jenn Rapp, from Taft Point, a promontory 3,000 feet above the valley floor, where the jump was staged is also being reviewed.
Yosemite’s chief of staff, Mike Gauthier, told the AP on Tuesday that Hunt may have been knocked off course after he clipped the side of a notch in an outcropping the two were attempting to fly through. Potter then swooped left to adjust as Hunt tumbled and hit the rocks on the opposite side of the notch.
“It could have been an evasive maneuver,” Gauthier told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Someone else said they saw a clipped piece of tree up there, so we don’t know for sure.”