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Extreme skier Shane McConkey once said: "There's something really cool about getting scared. I don't know what."

The 39-year-old British Columbia-born Californian, who died last Thursday when a jump went awry in the Italian Dolomites, was a skiing legend, the first person to adopt wider, "fat" skis to the world of cliffs, parachutes and death-defying descent. A series of movies of his exploits made him a star to enthusiasts of extreme skiing.

Mr. McConkey died while making his latest film, when his skis failed to detach, causing him to spin out of control and ultimately preventing him from deploying his parachute.

"It's like hearing that Superman died," said Jim Sloves, Mr. McConkey's friend from Lake Tahoe.

Mr. McConkey was known for his oddball sense of humour as much as his ability to leap off mountain cliffs in a single bound.

He was the product of a brief marriage between Jim McConkey, former ski-school director at Whistler, B.C., and a heli-skiing pioneer, and his second wife, Glenn, a renowned ski racer who still regularly wins age-category competitions.

Born in Vancouver, Mr. McConkey was raised in the United States and attended the prestigious Burke Mountain Academy, a breeding ground for some of America's top racers. He moved to Boulder, Colo., to attend university, but dropped out to compete in the nascent world of big-mountain free-ride skiing.

He was schooled in both racing and freestyle mogul skiing, but his fame shone at this farthest fringe of adventure sport, skiing near-vertical faces and couloirs in Alaska, South America and Europe.

Mr. McConkey was instrumental in forming the International Free Skiing Association tour and was twice crowned champion. His fame will forever be linked with 15 skiing movies produced by Matchstick Productions, an independent company based in Colorado, and directed by filmmaker Scott Gaffney.

When it released the feature documentary There's Something About McConkey in 2001, his career was only getting started. His reputation was not just as an adventure skier, but as a free-spirited personality who loved nothing better than self-parody. Creating his alter-ego Saucerboy, he chugged Jack Daniels bourbon straight from the bottle, wore tacky neon clothing, moonwalked on super-short "snowlerblades," and shredded everything from snowbanks to Alaskan peaks on a plastic flying saucer toy.

"Shane was not afraid to send up the whole ski film/sponsorship industry," said Jake Bogoch, editor of Skiing magazine. "He had little time for people who took themselves too seriously."

Yet there was genius in his goofy stunts. He became the first extreme skier to embrace "fat" skis. Nominally designed for beginners so that they could ski powder more easily by skimming along the surface, he pointed his fat skis straight down the fall line and arced out super-fast, high-speed turns while surfing on top of the snow.

"Catching air" was Mr. McConkey's favourite aspect of skiing, which led to embracing parachuting and later BASE (Building, Antenna, Span, Earth) jumping. He was among the first to marry BASE with skiing.

In 2003, Mr. McConkey began to incorporate BASE jumping into his ski film segments, launching a double front flip from near the summit of Switzerland's Eiger and then deploying his parachute for the ride back to terra firma.

Whistler-based free skier Mike Douglas, who often accompanied Mr. McConkey on film shoots, said that "Shane was always scheming about new projects to try, which is what attracted him to BASE jumping. When rumours first swirled about this gigantic gondola joining Whistler and Blackcomb, Shane immediately said he wanted to BASE jump from it. We approached Whistler-Blackcomb general manager Stuart Rempel and he gave Shane the green light to do it."

"He was always on us to get us to try BASE jumping, but my wife would kill me if I did," Mr. Douglas said. "I tried to be the voice of reason and often said, 'Shane, you've got to chill on this stuff.' "

Will Gadd, a paraglider pilot and ice climber from Canmore, Alta., put it this way: "He was at the ragged edge of a ragged sport where you have to be 100 per cent right every time."

Shane McConkey

Shane McConkey was born on Dec. 30, 1969, in Vancouver. He died on March 26, 2009, in Italy in a BASE skiing accident. He was 39. He leaves his wife, Sherry, his three-year-old daughter, Ayla, his father, Jim, and his mother, Glenn.