Updated June 15, 2026 04:06 pm
UPDATE: June 15: The man who jumped with Lewis has been identified as 68-year-old Danny Joe Craigle of Arizona, according to Moab. Times-Independent.
Phenomenal adventurer Andrew “Sketchy Andy” Lewis died Sunday, June 14, BASE jumping in Moab, Utah.
Lewis, 39, was parachuting with an unidentified man strapped to his chest, according to a press release posted on Facebook by the Grand County Sheriff’s Office (GCSO). Both victims died before rescue workers could rescue them from the scene.
“The Grand County Sheriff’s Office offers its deepest condolences to the families, friends and all affected by this tragic accident,” GSCO wrote in its release. The office did not respond outside Request for more information.
Lewis’ former fiancee and longtime romantic partner Hayley Ashburn told Outside The accident occurred at about 8:00 a.m., when Lewis and another man, a guided client, jumped off a 280-foot cliff at a location called Mary Gash. His parachute failed to open completely, said Ashburn, who spoke to Lewis’ close friend Brent Cain, an EMT and firefighter who was working with Lewis on the day of his death.
There was no cell service in the area, so after seeing the accident, Cain went outside to call emergency services.
GCSO first responders arrived approximately 45 minutes after Cain reached the fallen parachutists. According to Ashburn, Lewis died around 11:00 in the morning.
Lewis was an early pioneer of the sports of slacklining and highlining, balancing on a piece of webbing suspended between two anchor points, sometimes hundreds of feet above the ground. During the 2000s and 2010s, he helped popularize the sport among larger audiences.
He performed the first backflip on a slackline, held the Guinness World Record for most “side surf” (side-to-side swings) on a line in one minute, and held many other records over the years, such as the longest line run without a safety harness. 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 following her Super Bowl performance, Madonna proposed to Lewis to go on tour with her and perform for mainstream audiences.
“For months I had to consider it,” Lewis wrote at the time. “A chance at the big time… I had so many opportunities coming from the tour that it would be ridiculous.” Instead he decided to pursue slacklining and base jumping on his own.
Ashburn called his late teammate and friend “an inspiration to everyone in sports.”
He said, “He was a pioneer of slacklining, one of the most creative and boundary-breaking riggers we have ever seen.” “Andy started it all.”
Ashburn said Lewis was also one of the first multi-sport adventure athletes. He was not just a slackliner, but a talented rock climber, free soloist and BASE jumper, and a frequent mash-up of disciplines. For example, he would often lie down high above the ground without a safety harness, rather than strapping a parachute to his back.
“He was there first,” Ashburn said. “He showed us the whole way.”
Ryan Jenks, founder of gear testing website HowNot2, became a close friend of Lewis in 2016.
“The best memories of my life were with Andy,” he said. Outside. “You hear about ‘full life characters’ but rarely actually meet them. He entered life for the first time, and it was chaos. It brought me out of my shell and gave me confidence I never had before.”
In 2018, Lewis founded base jump moabAn extreme sports guiding company that takes 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 at Tandem Base Moab, the city’s only other local base jumping company. Lajeunesse posted a video on Facebook after Lewis’ death, acknowledging the extreme risk of the sport.
“Base jumping is crazy,” Lajeunesse said. “I’ve been skydiving and base jumping for the last 21 years of my life. I’ve lost a lot of people during that time.”
“No matter how much we enjoy it,” he added, “the one word I could never use to describe it would be ‘safe’.”
Ashburn said Lewis lived and died on his own terms.
“Andy was a guy who loved to push things forward and he got away with it brilliantly for almost 40 years,” he said.
Lewis is survived by his mother Lynn, father Roger and sister Molly. His family is in the process of organizing a GoFundMe to support a charity following his passing. The link to this fundraiser will be posted here when it becomes available.
