Andy Lewis

Andy Lewis, the daredevil who taught the world to take slacklining seriously, died on June 14, 2026, in a tandem BASE jump at Mineral Bottom near Moab, Utah. He was 39. Lewis and his tandem passenger, Danny Joe Kregle, 68, were both killed when the parachute failed to open.

To most people he was “Sketchy Andy,” the slackliner who shared the screen with Madonna at the 2012 Super Bowl. To the people who do this for a living, he was the figure who pulled slacklining out of college quads and made it a profession. He pioneered tricklining, performing flips and spins on a bouncing line, and won four straight world championships in competitive slacklining from 2008 to 2011.

What set Lewis apart was scale. In 2011 he set a Guinness World Record for the most slackline side-surfs in a single minute, rocking foot to foot as if surfing, recorded over China’s Diaoshuilou waterfall. In 2014 he walked a line strung between two hot air balloons more than 4,000 feet above the Nevada desert. Eventually he fused the line with the parachute, walking out to nothing and then jumping, and built a guiding business, BASE Jump Moab, around taking clients off cliffs strapped to his chest.

When Madonna’s Roman-themed halftime show filled the screen at Super Bowl XLVI, a curly-haired man in a toga was off to the side, bouncing on an inch-wide line as if it were a trampoline. To the hundred-million-plus people watching, he was a mystery. A Slate writer covering the game live guessed he might be Will Ferrell or a younger Richard Simmons. It was Andy Lewis, and almost no one in America had heard of him or his sport. Within three days, he told Conan O’Brien, his phone had rung itself to death.

From Santa Rosa, California, and a Humboldt State graduate, Lewis settled in Moab, where the red rock gave him an endless supply of edges to walk and leap from.

The grief in the outdoor community was immediate. “Quite the wave of love, art, and connection to a landscape and community that you will continue to have on this universe forever,” wrote climber and filmmaker Renan Ozturk. The slackliner Breannah Yeh captured what his tandem jumps meant to the people who trusted him:

Thank you for strapping me to your chest and jumping us off a cliff. I will continue to share life through adventure.

Lewis is survived by his mother, Lynn, his father, Roger, and his sister, Molly.