Moab reflects on Sketchy Andy's legacy after fatal BASE jump tragedy

Sena Taylor Hauer’s June 24 column turned Andy Lewis’s death at Mineral Bottom into a harder question for Moab: what kind of adventure culture does the town want to keep? Lewis and a guest died in a tandem BASE-jumping accident on June 14, and the response brought deputies, Grand County Search and Rescue, Grand County EMS and two Intermountain medical helicopters into the canyon corridor below the cliffs.

Hauer wrote Lewis not just as a local celebrity, but as a force who helped define the town’s outdoor personality. He was known as Sketchy Andy, a slackliner, jumper and showman whose résumé reached well beyond Utah: Guinness World Records says he set the mark for most side surfs on a slackline in one minute, with 143 on August 28, 2011, in Mudanjiang City, China. He later became widely known after appearing in Madonna’s 2012 Super Bowl halftime show.

The column used that biography to get at a larger truth about Moab. This is a place where people do not just visit the landscape, they build identities around it, and sometimes turn that identity into a business. Hauer’s observations about helicopters dropping jumpers near Fisher Towers and about tourism and private outdoor companies sharing public land made the same point from ground level: Moab’s adventure economy runs on the same scenery that makes the risk feel worth taking.

That tension is not abstract. The Bureau of Land Management says its Moab Field Office covers about 1.8 million acres and is a mecca for recreation that includes climbing, BASE jumping, hiking and rafting. The National Park Service says nearly 2.4 million visitors came to Southeast Utah Group parks in 2024, spending $421.9 million in nearby communities and producing a cumulative local economic benefit of $447 million. The crowd, the money and the access all feed the same engine that made Lewis a name people recognized.

The June 14 deaths also underscored how quickly that engine can turn tragic. Local reporting identified the second victim as Danny Joe Kregle, 68, and his family described him as a devoted father and proud grandfather. Moab BASE Association says BASE jumping on BLM lands around Moab is legal, subject to local rules and community respect, a reminder that the sport lives in the uneasy space between lawful access, local pride and real danger.

Hauer’s column did not try to sand off any of that. It left Moab with the same question it began with: how to keep the light that Lewis brought to the desert without pretending the cost of that glow is small.