MADISON, N.H. — FOR all his feats of athletic daring, Dean Potter preferred to think of himself as an artist. The extreme sports star’s greatest achievements, like walking a highline rigged across Upper Yosemite Falls or free-soloing a new route on Fitzroy, a 10,000-foot spike of granite in Argentina, required the sort of creative vision and self-belief that comes only from close study of the wilderness landscape, and constant practice.

Such commitment does not mesh well with celebrity: Mr. Potter spent the better part of a decade with no physical address, living in the boulder fields on the periphery of Yosemite Valley. Nonetheless, he became famous in a world that celebrated the extreme pursuits that led to his death.

It was in Yosemite, last Saturday, that he leapt off Taft Point, a promontory 3,000 feet above the valley floor, wearing a wingsuit and parachute. The jump was illegal. He was accompanied by another jumper, Graham Hunt, and his planned flight path required him to clear a notch in a rocky ridgeline. We will never know exactly what happened, but something went disastrously wrong, and both men crashed without deploying their chutes. Mr. Potter was 43.

For multitudes of fans who knew him through frequent films and articles documenting his exploits, Mr. Potter’s death was a shock. That alone says something about our culture’s naïve infatuation with extreme sports. For many of his peers, it was sadly unsurprising.