Sean Leary, 38, killed, after a BASE jumping accident at night in Zion National Park, Utah.

Sean Leary knew the dangers associated with climbing El Capitan or flying off a cliff in a wing suit, but like many extreme athletes, the excitement and freedom somehow made him feel more alive.

His pursuit of that intense adrenaline rush is what made him one of the country's greatest climbers and base jumpers.

It is also what killed him.

The body of Leary, 38, of El Portal in Mariposa County, was recovered Monday in the mountains of Zion National Park in Utah after he apparently clipped a rock outcropping during a base jump in a wing suit, which allows the jumper to steer through canyons before opening a parachute.

Friends said he had gone to Utah to work as a rigger and guide on a climbing film. On March 13, the day before the shoot, he decided to do a lone wing suit jump off West Temple formation in Zion a few hours after sunset with a bright moon above.

Dean Potter, his friend and climbing partner, said he apparently didn't see a notch in the mountain and clipped it at high speed, plummeting 100 feet down the mountain, where he was killed instantly.

Nobody knew he was missing until his wife, who is seven months pregnant, checked his e-mail and saw a message from the film company wondering why he hadn't shown up. Potter and eight others recovered his body Monday with help from a National Park Service search-and-rescue team.

His death sent shock waves through the Yosemite climbing community, where Leary was a hero not only for his climbing ability but for being humble and friendly.

"I'm just so terribly sad," said Nick Rosen, a friend and the producer at Sender Films, which specializes in documentaries about rock climbing and extreme sports. "It is hitting the community and Sean's friends so hard not only because he was one of the great unsung heroes, but because he was uniquely humble and caring and was just as incredible as a human being as he was as a climber."

It was a tragic end to a celebrated career climbing some of the most daunting big walls and cliffs in the world.

Leary, who was known as "Stanley," and Potter set the speed record in 2010 climbing up the Nose route on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, an athletic feat that climbers characterize as roughly equivalent to sprinting a marathon.

The record was broken two years later by Hans Florine and Alex Honnold, but Leary continued pushing limits on the vertical granite walls of Yosemite. He set a speed record with Honnold on what is known as the Salathé Wall, another route on El Capitan. In 2012, he and Mayan Smith-Gobat set the mixed male-female speed record for the Nose.

Leary climbed on Baffin Island, Patagonia, and, with another climber, established a new never-before-been-climbed route on Ulvetanna in Antarctica.

Ironically, Leary began wing suit and base jumping in 2006 after the woman he loved, a Brazilian climber named Roberta Nunes, died in his arms after a car crash, also in Utah, according to Rosen, who made a film about it called "Patagonia Promise."

'Affirmation of life'
"Right before she died she made him promise her that he would keep pursing adventure," Rosen said. "He was really, really low and base jumping became this affirmation of life for him. He wing suited off of El Mocho, a peak in Patagonia, and scattered her ashes. It's really tragic because, in a very real way, he had since risen from the ashes and had found love again and was looking forward to family life."

After his record-setting climb with Potter, Leary said he understood the risks.

"There are definitely risks we are taking, but we are trying to be safety-conscious," Leary said. "No one wants to die doing it."

In a video by aerial filmmaker and photographer Chad Copeland, Leary described the feeling of the takeoff in a wing suit.

"There's a second of absolute freedom. You're floating in the air," Leary says. "It's just magic when the wing suit pops open and inflates and you start to take off. Then you feel like, this must be what birds see, you know?"

Potter, in a phone call Wednesday as he returned from Zion, said that he will miss his friend, whom he spent many hours with talking about life as they walked their dogs together.