Climbing at the Speed of Soul (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine December 2002

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Climbing at the Speed of Soul (Cont.)


	Slackline walking, a climbers' pastime in Yosemite: Potter sometimes performs this dangerous stroll over an 850-foot drop—without a safety leash. (Andy Anderson)

POTTERS'S BEEN CALLED "mayor of the dirtbags," a reference to his standing among the crew of hardcore Yosemite wallrats, many of whom spend the season in the so-called climbers' campground, the storied Camp 4. It's not just Potter's prowess that commands respect, but his lifestyle; though he gets a modest stipend from the Patagonia deal and free shoes and gear from two other sponsors, he continues to live simply, even monastically. Until recently, his home was a white Ford van with a 500cc dirt bike hung on the back bumper. When I looked inside, it wasn't the jumble of dirty clothes and half-eaten Cup-a-Soups that I expected, but a spartan temple to the gods of fast-and-light: a futon, a drawer filled with climbing shoes, and another containing ropes.

Potter was born in 1972 in a military hospital at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the son of an army colonel father and a yoga teacher mother—an unlikely pairing that may help explain his particular dichotomy. "The meditative side of Dean comes from his mother, and the competitive side from both of us—we do not like to lose," says his dad, Tony Potter, 66, who now lives in Randolph, New Hampshire. Potter's mother, 63-year-old Patricia Dellert, is now a registered nurse in Yarmouth, Maine. (The Potters separated five years ago, but remain close.) One-quarter Skaticook Indian, Dellert is passionate about the outdoors and natural healing, and has long followed a daily yoga practice.

"Dean is like me," says his mother. "I hesitate to use the word spiritual. We're not involved in organized religion, but we're, well, seekers."

When Potter was four, his father was assigned for a couple of years to the Middle East as a UN peacekeeper. Potter's first climbs were scrambles to hilltop fortresses in the hinterlands of the West Bank. Later, after the family moved to New Hampshire, Potter started training by himself, running and lifting weights, and soon he and a friend were sneaking onto a nearby military base to climb a 250-foot crag. "We had no idea what we were doing," Potter says. "We were climbing this pretty scary stuff in Converse All-Stars, getting way up there without a rope or anything."

In 1990, at the age of 18, Potter enrolled at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, where he discovered the sport that, at least on paper, he was made for: rowing. "He oozed with talent, but I think it was a frustration for him," recalls his coach, Chris Allsopp, now at the U.S. Naval Academy. "Crew is the quintessential team sport, and his temperament made it hard for him to conform."

One day early in his sophomore year, Potter skipped practice and didn't go back. "I was having all these thoughts, not really sure what I was doing in school," he says. "And I just said, ÔI'm gonna go out and climb.' I had this great day with a friend, bouldering and rooting each other on, and I came back thinking, 'I don't like the way it feels to be competitive. I don't want to be ruled by it.' " Potter left college a few weeks later, working for a moving company in Boston before heading to northern New Hampshire, where he started climbing in earnest. He was more or less adopted by John and Titoune Bouchard, the husband-and-wife founders of the North Conway-based outdoor gear company Wild Things. "He seemed like a big goofy kid, too big to climb, but we went out and he flew up some things that I couldn't climb," recalls John Bouchard, who has remarried and now lives in Bend, Oregon. "Even then, you could see that he was a pretty pure climber. He didn't care what others thought, what kind of shoes he wore, none of that."

A year later, at age 20, Potter headed west on a road trip with some climbing buddies—a trip he's never really returned from. One early stop was at Hueco Tanks, a popular bouldering spot near El Paso, Texas. There he met O'Neill, and a few months later O'Neill introduced him to Yosemite. "When I got to Yosemite and finally saw this place, I realized I'd made the right decision," Potter says. "It was the first time I ever felt that."

Potter had a rough first season in the Valley, throwing himself at big routes that he wasn't quite ready for. "At the end of that year I had no confidence," Potter says. "So in '93 I came back and started from the ground up. I stayed for three months and climbed everything of a certain grade before moving on to the next."

By 1997, Potter's increasingly strong skills had earned him a spot on Yosemite's search-and-rescue team, a prestigious honor that came with the ultimate perk—a free, year-round tent site at Camp 4. But there were problems. For one thing, Potter had frequent run-ins with park authorities, and eventually became convinced that a few rangers were "waging a personal vendetta to try to force me from the place I live." Meanwhile, a relationship with rock climber Steph Davis—which had started after a chance 1994 encounter on the Diamond, the 2,000-vertical-foot east wall of Colorado's Longs Peak—sputtered along in on-again, off-again mode, and Potter found himself yo-yoing between California and Davis's place in Moab, Utah.

"It was a super up-and-down life, too much so," he says. "I'd get depressed, focus on the next escape, and never really pursue things."

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