Dean Potter and his wife, Steph Davis, two of the most accomplished mountaineers in the world, will no longer be rock climbing ambassadors for the Patagonia outdoors clothing company, Potter said this week in Jackson.

The split between the famous couple and the well-known company comes almost a year after Potter made a controversial ascent of Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, Utah, last spring. The latest development in Potter’s high-profile career, which moved into dicey terrain following the arch ascent, will put him at arm’s length from a company that has pioneered environmentalism around the globe in a fashion never before seen.

Potter, a superb alpinist, rock climber, slackline walker, BASE jumper and aerialist, is breaking such new ground in the mountain scene that Alpinist Film Festival organizer Christian Beckwith labeled him a “climbing provocateur.” In Jackson to attend that gathering last weekend, Potter said in an interview that he and Davis would end their relationship with the Ventura, Calif., firm, owned by Jackson Hole homeowners Yvon and Malinda Chouinard.

“Patagonia does some really amazing things for the environment that are much more important than my climbing,” Potter said. “Their mission is a really important one and I wouldn’t want to affect that in a negative way.

“My thoughts about being free were too risky for them to back,” Potter said. “The negative effects are too big for them. ... So we went our separate ways.”

Potter’s lanky build, shaggy mane and bold tactics have made him a name as he has racked up speed alpine ascents and solo climbs that astonish. He became the first person to solo both Fitzroy and Cerro Torre in Patagonia, Argentina, and turned heads by walking a rope over dizzying and deadly drops.

Today he is pushing the limits of climbing as he seeks to ascend mountains, jump off them and glide in a suit fitted with fabric “wings” to land with a parachute at the base of his next objective. Yet as he sought the freedom of the hills with his envelope-pushing feats, Potter ran into conflict with conservationists, and a large part of his climbing community, with his ascent of Delicate Arch.

Park officials, who thought climbing on arches already was prohibited, imposed new restrictions on climbing, while climbers attacked Potter in Internet forums. They and conservationists even accused him of damaging the fragile feature after a photographer shot pictures of grooves thought to have been caused by the dragging of a rope across Delicate’s sandstone face.

And while he has apologized for his ascent, Potter wonders whether there still is freedom in the hills, or whether our remote places are so regulated one can no longer go there, as John Muir once did, to find one’s soul.

Raised in New Hampshire as the son of an Army soldier and U.N. liaison, Potter, 34, told a film festival audience he grew up as a “misfit kid.” He played in the woods, a rebel hunting and fishing. His first climbing was on Joe English cliff.

“My parents forbid me to go there,” he said. “You had to break in.”

Climbing without ropes on routes that are traditionally safeguarded with mountaineering hardware, he and his buddies had their first brush with death. “No one taught us rules,” Potter said.

Childhood dreams of flying may have played a role in his quests, Potter said. Ultimately, it was in nature and on the cliffs that he found solace.

“I had my problems with attention in school,” Potter said. “It didn’t happen with climbing.

“The main thing that’s drawn me in is the heightened awareness that danger brings, that beauty brings,” he said. “That seems to bring out the extra power in me – when I’m really alert.”

“The mountains for me are about chasing after freedom and following impulses,” he said. “I’m not for rules, taking away freedom.”

Part of his relationship with the mountains are efforts to walk ropes, known among climbers as slacklines, strung between rock towers and walls. He also is a BASE jumper – one who leaps off buildings, antennae, spans and earth features – with a parachute. But BASE jumping is illegal in national parks, and slacklining is under fire after his walk between The Gossips, sandstone towers in Arches.

Potter argues that his BASE jumping and slackline walking do not harm the environment. Prohibitions against them “are bringing us farther away from our spirit,” he said.

Such thinking led him to the ascent of Delicate Arch, the landmark on Utah license plates and an image engraved on the back of medals awarded at the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. Potter climbed the roughly 60-foot-tall formation of Entrada sandstone last spring without a belay rope, a feat publicized with photographs and a video.

The climb won him more attention than he bargained for, and almost all of it negative. While he appears to have slipped through a loophole in national park regulations, critics were eager to point to grooves worn in the sensitive feature and blame them on Potter’s practice rope, or one employed by a cameraman. Moreover, the unwritten rule among climbers in Moab, Utah, Potter’s home along with Yosemite Valley, Calif., was to avoid confrontation with officialdom.

Accusation of egotism

“There are rules you know you’re not supposed to break – they’re not necessarily written,” said Sam Lightner, a Jackson Hole and Moab resident, climber and a board member of the national climbing advocacy group the Access Fund. “All climbers know we got the towers, everybody else got the arches.”

Wilson resident and Access Fund founder Armando Menocal said Potter was thoughtless.

“He let his ego get ahead of the overall interest of the climbing community,” Menocal said.

Reaction from the public and the Park Service to Potter’s climb was intense and immediate. Among the letters that flooded acting chief ranger Paul Cowan’s desk was one from U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah calling for action, Lightner said.

“We realized our climbing guidelines needed to be clarified last year,” park Superintendent Laura Joss said in a telephone interview from Arches on Monday. The result was a restating of what the park thought had been a ban on climbing named arches, plus a prohibition against the placing of new fixed climbing anchors. And by the way, no more slacklining either, the park said.

Joss would not elaborate on Potter’s climb.

“The incident is still under investigation,” she said.

Arches is now soliciting public comments on how to address climbing and what regulations to adopt permanently. Interim prohibitions have Lightner, Menocal and their ilk perturbed, and they blame Potter.

“He denied all other climbers the opportunity to put up routes on towers in what is probably the largest, last undeveloped area,” Menocal said. If Potter had done his climb without fanfare, “I believe it probably would have made a difference with the Park Service,” he said.

Lightner agreed. “Everybody understood you don’t rub the public’s face in climbing,” he said.

Potter took too long to apologize, Lightner said.

“He didn’t seem to care. If Dean had come out and said, ‘I screwed up,’ I think this would not have been as bad for us.”

Potter said he didn’t hurt anything, never broke a law. His cameraman used a rope to reach the summit, and Potter admitted to using a monkey fist knot to get a line over the arch. To practice for his unroped ascent, he employed a traction device on the rope. He said he never dragged the line over a part of the arch that would cause wear.

No top-rope involved

“The rock scars are actually from a top-rope, and I never used a top-rope,” Potter said. A recent e-mail from a climbing friend named a now-dead climber, one who once lived in Jackson Hole, as a previous ascensionist of Delicate Arch, Potter said. Perhaps he created the climbing-rope grooves.

“I’ve always respected nature,” Potter said. “People who know me know I would never hurt the rock. If I pounded the rock with a hammer or destroyed a tree ... that would be a mistake.”

“There wasn’t any legal reason for me not to climb it,” Potter said of Delicate Arch. “I didn’t see any moral reason not to climb it. I didn’t hurt it.”

Potter said he would not climb Totem Pole, the spire in Monument Valley that Navajo imbue with religious significance. Delicate Arch, despite its prominence on Utah license plates, doesn’t have the stature of that sacred Arizona tower, he said.

“I didn’t see a reason why it’s wrong, why we shouldn’t mesh with nature,” Potter said.

He didn’t expect the reaction he got, either.

“I thought values like freedom and being one with nature were such a common thread, it blew me away that other people found higher importance elsewhere,” he said.  “It was sort of an embarrassing surprise. I think of myself as tuned in. It does make me think twice and try to be open to things out there.”

Potter said that today he is a wiser man: “I have hurt people’s feelings – especially with Delicate Arch. That’s something I didn’t intend.”

The feelings of his partners and climbers are most important, he said, calling the episode “a super learning mistake.”

The outlawing of slacklining, Potter said, he doesn’t comprehend.

“The Park Service never talked to me,” he said. “I really don’t understand that one.”

“I didn’t break any law, didn’t hurt the rock,” Potter said. “Something must have bothered them about filling this unowned space. I’m still baffled. What was wrong there?”

Instead of being able to commune with nature in his own way and pursue his sport to his limits, Potter said, he must travel instead to foreign countries. “The most wild places in our country are becoming the most confined places in terms of freedom,” he said.

In Ventura, Rob Bon Durant, vice president of marketing and communications for Patagonia, said Potter and Davis will cease their association with the company at the end of the fiscal year, May 1.

“Dean and Steph will not remain ambassadors,” he said, calling their departure part of a “natural cycle.”

There are no hard feelings, Bon Durant added. “Everybody’s on great terms,” he said.

Potter said that Davis also losing her position with Patagonia was the biggest blow. “She got dragged in and somehow exiled with me,” he said.

“Yvon and Malinda are really like family to us,” Potter said of the Chouinards. “We really respect them. We hoped to be with Patagonia the rest of our lives.”