Everest kills SA 'princess'

 23 May, 2016 

Marisa Strydom and her husband Robert Gropel on an earlier expedition.
Image by: FACEBOOK

On Saturday Maritha Strydom was celebrating her daughter summiting Mount Everest with a whisky, but a day later she was mourning her death.

Satellite pings from her daughter Marisa Strydom and her husband Robert Gropel's phones on Everest alerted Strydom's mother that they had been near the summit on Friday night.

But yesterday she learnt through a story on the internet that her "beautiful daughter" was believed to have died of altitude sickness on the slopes of Mount Everest. People paid tribute to South Africa-born Marisa - she and Gropel were living in Australia - with one calling her a "mountain warrior princess".

But yesterday a news story in the Himalayan Times reported that she was dead.

Strydom's sister, Aletta Newman, lashed out at Dutch mountaineering company Arnold Coster for not telling the family of the death.

Reports later emerged that Strydom, who went to school in Pretoria, and Gropel had been within 400m of the summit on Saturday but turned back because Strydom felt weak. She apparently then stopped breathing.

Gropel, a veterinarian, was in a critical condition and had been taken down the mountain by sled.

The pair had been in Nepal at Everest for five weeks.

Strydom got engaged to Gropel in 2009 on a trip up Aconcagua in Argentina as part of her dream to reach the seven highest summits on the seven continents. She climbed Kilimanjaro with Gropel in 2014. The pair had also climbed Denali in Alaska and Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey.

Both vegans, they were determined to climb the seven summits to show "vegans can do anything and more".

In March Strydom said in an interview with Monash University News: "Once we decided to climb the seven summits we knew we would have to confront Mount Everest at some point."

Strydom lived in Melbourne, where she worked at the university as a finance lecturer from 2006. The university said yesterday it was saddened at the loss.

The first thing Strydom planned to do when she came down the mountain was to have a hot shower, she said in a Monash interview.