How Kuntal Joisher Scaled Mount Everest Without Using Animals
The dedicated vegan reached the top of the tallest mountain in the world once already, but the second time he had something even more to prove
“Mountaineer by passion, vegan by compassion,” reads the bio on Kuntal Joisher’s Instagram profile. When this 39-year-old vegan mountaineer from Mumbai, India, stood at 29,029 feet on the summit of Mount Everest on May 23, 2019, it was his second time at the top of the world. Three years earlier he had scaled the world’s tallest mountain along its south face from Nepal and became the first to do so on a plant-based diet. This time, he climbed the mountain’s north face from Tibet, using only vegan equipment.
“I wanted to attempt the summit again because I felt that I didn’t finish the project that I had started,” he explains. “During my first summit in 2016, my diet was 100 percent vegan but my equipment wasn’t. For me, [veganism is] more than a diet, so it was important for me to complete this goal by not using anything made of animals.”
