A popular climber who became famous for her bikini-clad selfies on top of mountains has died after falling down a ravine.

Gigi Wu, nicknamed the Bikini Climber, used a satellite phone on Saturday to say she had fallen down a ravine in Taiwan’s Yushan national park.

A rescue operation was launched but bad weather conditions made it difficult to find her until yesterday, but she had frozen to death while waiting.

Gigi Wu posed for pictures at the peak of mountains wearing just her bikini (Picture: AsiaWire)

She fell down a ravine over the weekend but was able to contact her friends

Fire service spokesman Lin Cheng-yi said: ‘The weather conditions in the mountains are not good, we have asked our rescuers to move the body to a more open space and after the weather clears we will make a request for a helicopter to bring the body down.’




She is believed to have fallen up to 100ft but she was unable to give her coordinates when she contacted friends.

New Taipei City native Wu, 36, built up a sizeable social media following through photos of herself at the top of mountains dressed in bikinis.

She usually wore hiking clothes to scale the mountains, only changing into a bikini once she reached the top.

In an interview with local channel FTV last year, she said she had scaled more than 100 peaks in four years.

She was found frozen to death by rescuers

She had a large following on Instagram and was known as the Bikini Climber (Picture: AsiaWire)

She said: ‘I put on a bikini in each one of the 100 mountains. I only have around 97 bikinis so I accidentally repeated some.’

When asked why she did it, she replied: ‘It just looks so beautiful, what’s not to like?’

Lin said their top rescue team hiked for 28 hours to reach the body, only sleeping for three hours because they knew temperatures were rapidly plunging.

She is the latest in a string of social media adventure seekers who have met an untimely end.

The rescue mission was hampered by bad weather (Picture: AsiaWire)

Last week, the bodies of an Indian couple were found at the bottom of a popular overlook in California’s Yosemite National Park after hikers alerted officials to their camera equipment at the top of the cliff.

While Taiwan is a largely tropical country, it boasts a spine of towering peaks down its middle that regularly top 3,000 metres. In the winter, temperatures routinely drop well below freezing on the mountain slopes.