Woman trying to prove ‘vegans can do anything’ among four dead on Mount Everest

29,029. That’s how many feet in the air the peak of Mount Everest towers over Nepal, and the world, in its gleaming white brilliance.

Since the British first billed it as the highest point on Earth in 1856, that snow-capped tip, where almost no life can survive without mechanical assistance because of oxygen levels that are one-third those at sea level, sings a siren song to some high achievers.

In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa offered photographic evidence that proved the feat achievable. Achievable, yes, but maddeningly difficult. The quest to reach (and return from) it has cost humanity more than 250 lives over the years.

It’s such a herculean task that it has become the linguistic stand-in for any difficult job — writing that novel or completing that marathon was “my own personal Everest,” some might say.

For Maria Strydom and her husband, Robert Gropel, climbing Everest while adhering to a strict vegan diet was their “own personal Everest.”

Strydom, 34, a lecturer at Monash Business School in Melbourne, Australia, had a message she wanted to share with the world: Veganism is not a handicap.

She and Gropel, a Melbourne veterinarian, both stuck closely to the rigorous diet required by vegans — no animal products whatsoever, which extends from scrambled eggs to most chocolate chip cookies — for which they experienced criticism. Some thought they didn’t receive enough iron and protein in their diet for such strenuous physical activity.

“It seems that people have this warped idea of vegans being malnourished and weak,” Strydom said in an interview on Monash’s blog. “By climbing the seven summits, we want to prove that vegans can do anything and more.”

Those “seven summits” refer to the highest peak on each of the seven continents. They had to wait on Everest, though.

The mountain has been mostly untouched by ambitious adventurers for the past two years — in fact, last year was the first to pass without a climber reaching the summit — because of a pair of natural disasters.

The first tragedy swept through in 2014 in the form of an avalanche, the mountain’s deadliest accident to date, which immediately killed 12 Sherpa guides and injured three more. The second arrived in 2015 as a pair of earthquakes that claimed more than 8,000 lives in Nepal.

That gave the couple time to train vigorously in preparation. In those intervening years, they certainly proved that their diet wouldn’t keep them from mountain-climbing by scaling Denali in Alaska, Mount Ararat in Turkey and Kilimanjaro in Africa, among others.

But Everest is Everest, and they wanted to tackle it, even given the spate of recent deaths, even when Gropel’s uncle warned them not to.

“I had a foreboding, a bad feeling,” Kurt Gropel told the Sydney Morning Herald. “I said, ‘I don’t want you to go.’ They weren’t very happy about that.”

“Everest is a killer,” he added. “There are 200 corpses up there that decorate the path. They are all people who thought they could go up and down.”

But the couple felt prepared.

“A very experienced guide in Alaska once told us that of all the things you can regret once you are on the mountain, you will never regret overtraining,” Strydom said before the climb. “It is also important to get experience spending long periods on a mountain.”

Everest, though, proved unscalable for them. The couple reached Camp Four, the final camp 400 meters from the summit before both suffered high-altitude pulmonary edema, colloquially known as altitude sickness. It caused fluid to build up in Strydom’s brain, which killed her Saturday.

Robert Gropel, alive but fighting a fluid buildup in his lungs, had to be taken down the mountain by sled. He was taken to a hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Heinz Gropel, Robert Gropel’s father, said he will likely recover, at least in body.

“Physically he’s OK, we think,” Heinz Gropel said. “Mentally he is a mess. He’s just lost his wife. These guys were not amateurs. They were experienced climbers.”

Strydom was one of four people seemingly in the primes of their respective lives to have succumbed to the mountain’s many dangers since Thursday.

The latest, according to The Associated Press: Subash Paul, an Indian climber who had fallen sick and was being helped down the mountain by Sherpa guides when he died Monday.

“It is not clear what happened,” expedition organizer Wanchu Sherpa, of Trekking Camp Nepal, told CNN. “We believe the weather suddenly deteriorated at some point, and the team lost direction.”

Two other members of Paul’s team are now missing.

“We are trying to communicate with other expedition teams around that level to locate the missing climbers,” Gyanendra Shrestha of the Nepal Tourism Department told CNN.

Meanwhile, around 30 more climbers have become sick, frostbitten or both near the summit during the past few days, the Associated Press reported.

Another member of Strydom and Robert Gropel’s climbing party, Eric Arnold, 36, of Rotterdam, Netherlands, also died.

For him the quest was one instilled since childhood. The professional mountaineer and motivational speaker had tried in three previous years to scale the mountain. It was his life’s passion.

“Mount Everest is my big childhood dream,” he told The Post in a profile before his climb.

Hanging over his teenage bed were two posters: one of actress Pamela Anderson and one of the mountain he planned to someday climb.

After four years of attempts, Arnold finally reached the summit and even managed to send a tweet from it, but he began suffering altitude sickness during his descent, the AP reported.

Though he had with him enough oxygen, Arnold grew too weak to make it to the lower altitude required for his symptoms to begin subsiding. He died Friday.

Before his fatal attempt, his fourth in all, Arnold told The Post that he didn’t feel as if he had a choice, even knowing the risks.

“A lot of people say, ‘Maybe it’s not your turn, maybe it’s not your fate, maybe the mountain is telling you not to climb it,’ ” he said. “But I still have a passion for it. When I realized that, I decided I have to go back.”

The fourth person who has died during this year’s climbing season was simply doing his job.

Phurba Sherpa, 25, plunged to his death Thursday while attempting to fix a route for future climbers 150 meters under the summit, CNN reported.

The Sherpas are the people who set up Everest Base Camp, install and fix ropes throughout the path to the summit, and guide paying climbers to the top. The work pays anywhere from $4,000 to $30,000 a season in a country with an annual per capita income of $700.

On Everest, death is not necessarily a sign of failure so much as one of a particularly sad inevitability. Much like many places that humans have ventured in our boundless curiosity — from the ocean depths to outer space — it cannot sustain life, and it often takes them.

Shrestha told the BBC that altitude sickness and fatigue, alongside natural factors like blizzards and avalanches, kill a few climbers each year. It’s a potential outcome known to Everest’s climbers and gruesomely illustrated along the way by the almost 200 bodies that have frozen on or near the peak.

The most unavoidable for those reaching the top is what is thought to be the body of Tsewang Paljor, a young Indian climber who died in the 1996 blizzard. To reach the summit on the north side of the mountain, climbers sometimes have to step over his frozen legs.

That isn’t to say it’s unconquerable. Far from it: More than 4,000 people have reached the summit since 1953. This year alone, more than 330 have reached it, according to NBC. But as the body count continues to rise with each passing year, some familiar with the mountain are beginning to argue that mounting it isn’t worth the risks.

“I used to see the media stories that came out, and they’d be only about death and destruction, and I’d say, ‘Well, my mountain is not about death,’ ” Dave Hahn, an RMI Expedition mountain guide who has reached the summit of Everest 15 times, told BBC last year. “But the last two years have brought such a huge loss of life that it’s become hard for me to continue to make that argument.”

Still, this year’s tragedies aren’t likely to stop future climbers from taking on the almost mythical quest. As Adrian Ballinger, an Everest guide who survived the 2015 earthquake, told The Post: “I still see a huge amount of interest in Everest. The fact that there are risks in climbing Everest is part of its allure.”

This story was originally published May 23, 2016 at 7:47 PM with the headline "Woman trying to prove ‘vegans can do anything’ among four dead on Mount Everest."