Published June 15, 2026 02:44PM
Groundbreaking daredevil Andrew “Sketchy Andy” Lewis died BASE jumping in Moab, Utah, on Sunday, June 14.
The 39-year-old Lewis was parachuting in tandem, with an unidentified man, aged approximately 50, strapped to his chest, according to a press release the Grand County Sheriff’s Office (GCSO) posted to Facebook. Both victims died before rescuers could evacuate them from the scene.
“The Grand County Sheriff’s Office extends its deepest sympathies to the families, friends, and all those affected by this tragic accident,” the GSCO wrote in its release. The office did not respond to Outside’s request for further information.
Hayley Ashburn, Lewis’s ex-fiancé and longtime romantic partner, told Outside that the accident occurred at around 8:00 A.M., when Lewis and the second man, a guided client, jumped off a 280-foot cliff at a site known as Mary’s Gash. Their parachute failed to fully open, said Ashburn, who spoke with Lewis’s close friend Brent Cain, an EMT and firefighter who was working with Lewis on the day he died.
There was no cell service in the area, so after witnessing the accident, Cain drove out to phone for emergency services.
First responders from the GCSO arrived roughly 45 minutes after Cain reached the fallen parachutists. Lewis died around 11:00 A.M., according to Ashburn.
Lewis was a leading pioneer of the sports of slacklining and highlining, balancing on a piece of webbing suspended between two anchor points, sometimes hundreds of feet off the ground. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, he helped popularize the sport with a larger audience.
He landed the first-ever backflip on a slackline, held the Guinness World Record for the most “side surfs” (side-to-side swings) on a line in a single minute, and for years set and held a number of other records, such as the longest line walked without a safety tether. In 2010, Lewis won the Slackline World Cup. Two years later, he performed on a slackline at the 2012 Super Bowl, during Madonna’s halftime show.
Following the media buzz after his Super Bowl performance, Madonna gave Lewis an offer to go on tour with her and perform for a mainstream audience.
“Over months I had to mull it over,” Lewis wrote at the time. “A chance at the big time … I had so many opportunities that would arise from the tour it would be ridiculous.” He chose instead to continue slacklining and BASE jumping on his own.
Ashburn called her late partner and friend “an inspiration to everyone in the sport.”
“He was the pioneer of slacklining, one of the most creative and boundary-breaking riggers we’ve ever seen,” she said. “Andy started it all.”
Ashburn noted that Lewis was also one of the first multi-sport adventure athletes. He wasn’t just a slackliner, but a talented rock climber, free soloist and BASE jumper, and a frequent merger of disciplines. For example, he often slacklined high above the ground without a safety tether, instead strapping a parachute to his back.
“He was just there first,” Ashburn said. “He showed us all the way.”
Ryan Jenks, the founder of the gear testing website HowNOT2, became close friends with Lewis in 2016.
“Most of my best memories in life were with Andy,” he told Outside. “You hear about ‘full life characters’ but rarely actually meet them. He dove head first into life, and it was chaos. It broke me out of my shell and gave me confidence I never had before.”
In 2018, Lewis founded BASE Jump Moab, an extreme sports guiding company that took clients on canyoneering and rock climbing trips, hot air balloon rides, rope swings, and tandem BASE jumps.
Matt LaJeunesse is the founder and lead guide of the only other local BASE jumping company in town, Tandem BASE Moab. LaJeunesse posted a video to Facebook in the wake of Lewis’s death, acknowledging the sport’s extreme risk.
“BASE jumping is crazy,” LaJeunesse said. “I’ve been around skydiving and BASE jumping for the past 21 years of my life. I have lost a lot of people over the course of time.”
“No matter how much we enjoy it,” he added, “one word I could never use to describe it would be ‘safe.’”
Ashburn said that Lewis lived, and died, on his own terms.
“Andy was a human being who loved to push the envelope,” she said, “and he got away with it, spectacularly, for almost 40 years.”
Lewis leaves behind his mother, Lynn, father, Roger, and sister, Molly. His family is in the process of organizing a GoFundMe to support a charity in the wake of his passing. A link to this fundraiser will be posted here when available.
