Carlos Suárez, the Alpinist and Wingsuit Pilot Who Was Determined to Live an Authentic Life
Every January, we share a tribute to members of our community who we lost last year. Some were legends, others were pillars of their community, all were climbers. Read the full tribute to Climbers We Lost in 2025 here.
Carlos Suárez, 52, April 1
In a tragic set of circumstances, Carlos Suárez, a longtime climber, BASE jumper, and wingsuit pilot, was killed in a wingsuit accident while filming a movie about his own life. The crash occurred on April 1, 2025, just as the 52-year-old Spaniard was filming stunts for the movie “La Fiera” (The Beast), a film that chronicles his friendship with four other pioneers of wingsuit flying and proximity flying in Spain. Today, of that group of five friends, only Armando del Rey is still alive.
“Carlos was an idol for us, a force of nature, someone very confident who didn’t want to end up like he did,” said del Rey, while acknowledging that, perhaps, it is unrealistic to speak of safety when referring to wingsuit flying, a constantly evolving sport with many unknowns still to be explored. “Carlos jumped, but his barometric parachute didn’t open. He could have manually deployed the reserve parachute, but he didn’t. I think he must have fainted mid-flight, or suffered some similar incident that prevented him from pulling the ripcord,” del Rey said.
Like many climbers of his generation, Suárez first fell in love with mountaineering through its literature. He devoured the classics, seeking to understand both mountaineering’s evolution and his own place in that world. He eventually became an avid climbing writer, too, contributing articles for numerous magazines and sections of books.
One of his first major climbs came when he was barely 17 years old. He arrived wide-eyed in Chamonix and free soloed the storied North Face of the Grandes Jorasses via its Cassin Route to the Walker Spur. He later repeated the Bonatti Pillar of Les Dru. Climbing partners described Suárez has having the energy of an exploding rocket; fast, committed, and audacious.
Many other solo ascents followed, sometimes with ropes and sometimes without, free soloing 8a (5.13b) sport routes like Cazaprimeras in 1996. Suárez was acutely aware that mountaineering was a breeding ground for premature deaths, a danger he chose to face with physical excellence, technique, and calculation, but without sacrificing adventure, the true driving force of his passion. Climbing without a rope might have seemed like madness, but it was, in reality, an act of calculated honesty, thought out and dissected to achieve complete fulfillment.
Despite these values, Suárez’s passion for mountaineering began to fade with the passing years. It had begun to feel too narrow of a path for him, a theater where he repeated variations of the same play, a risky, unique work… but always similar. At the beginning of this century, he seemed like an artist without a stage, a person in transit toward some destination no one seemed to foresee. He was a man with many questions and few answers, someone tied to his glorious youth as a star of the vertical world and, at the same time, needing a connection to a future he couldn’t quite imagine. Should he be like everyone else? Look for a family, a home, a stable job—simply vanish?
BASE jumping came to rescue him from his self-absorption, gifting him a renewed, unknown, fresh passion. How many people are fortunate enough to find two passions in the same life? He understood that in the mountains, the extreme only leads to a dead end: addiction or a premature death. He needed new ways to express himself, however much they might have the familiar flavor of a known game. With BASE jumping, some would say, fate still hung in the air.
The easiest explanation would have been that Suárez was simply swapping one addiction for another, one type of adrenaline rush for the latest trend. The real challenge lies in understanding what benefits come from engaging in so-called extreme activities. Suárez never knew. Nevertheless, curiosity drove him to action: it was no longer about exposing himself to emulate his idols, to prove his abilities, to feed his ego, but simply to gain some understanding. He wasn’t seeking feats, but answers, a glimmer of comprehension. To know, at the very least, what our purpose is in this world.
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