A Melbourne woman who died while descending from the summit of Mount Everest has been identified as Dr Maria Strydom, a finance lecturer from Monash University‘s Department of Banking and Finance.
The 34-year-old had been in Nepal for a month, and was on the way down the mountain with her husband, passing between Camp 4 and Camp 3, when she began to show signs of altitude sickness.
Pasang Phurba Sherpa, a board director at Seven Summit Treks, told media:
“After reaching the summit yesterday she said she was feeling very weak and suffering from a loss of energy… signs of altitude sickness.”
Dr Strydom was an experienced climber, who in the past several years had climbed Denali in Alask, Aconcagua in Argentina, Mount Ararat in Turkey and Kilimanjaro in Africa.
She was a vegan and had said that she was determined to climb Everest in order to challenge stereotypes about the diet.
“It seems that people have this warped idea of vegans being malnourished and weak,” she said earlier this year. “By climbing the seven summits we want to prove that vegans can do anything and more.”
According to Seven Summit Treks, Dutch mountaineer Eric Arnold, who was in the same climbing party as Dr Strydom, also died on the trek, after suffering altitude sickness at Camp 4 on Friday.
A Nepali sherpa also fell to his death this past week, as he was fixing ropes on nearby Lhotse, the word’s fourth-highest peak.
Source: ABC News.
Photo: Monash University / ABC News.
