Please enable Javascript to watch this video 
 
 HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. -- The search continues for a Littleton police officer who went missing while mountain climbing in Russia last week. 
 
 Steven Beare hasn’t been heard from since Friday. He was attempting a solo climb of Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe. 
 
 “His goal is to complete the seven world summits,” his wife Olivia Beare said. 
 
 The high school sweethearts have been together 14 years. They have a toddler and another baby on the way in January. 
 
 “That’s not the only reason I need my husband home, but it’s definitely a big reason," she said. "I can’t raise two babies by myself. He is everything in the world to me.” 
 
 Beare is an Army veteran, a member of the Colorado National Guard and has been an officer with the Littleton Police Department for 1 1/2 years. 
 
 "We are keeping officer Beare and his family in our thoughts and prayers. Steven is a highly respected officer for the LPD and all of us are hopeful he will be located quickly," police said in a statement. 
 
 “When circumstances appear hopeless, you fight through and win, no matter what,” Chief Doug Stephens said. “That’s what cops do and I am confident that Steven is doing that now.” 
 
 Beare developed a passion for mountain climbing five years ago and has summited difficult peaks such as Mount Kilimanjaro. 
 
 “He was ready for this climb,” Olivia Beare said. “He felt confident in his skills and his equipment that he has.” 
 
 She said the two have a rule that Steven Beare always calls home when he is finished climbing a mountain. He was due back down Friday but never called. 
 
 A massive snowstorm blanketed the mountain while Beare was climbing. A nearby group has reported seeing him go up but lost sight of him when they were forced to turn back because of low visibility in the snow. 
 
 “He does have other equipment for getting water and through all of his military training, he’s got a ton of mountaineering experience and survival skills," Olivia Beare said. 
 
 "He knows how to hunker down in snow and make a hut. But if he’s injured, I don’t know if that’s happening." 
 
 She said she is hopeful, but worried. 
 
 “The biggest obstacle right now that my husband faces is the cold and the 4 feet of snow that was dumped in this blizzard,” she said. “I’m just worried he’s going to freeze to death.” 
 
 Now it’s a race against the clock. Olivia Beare has been coordinating overseas rescue efforts from her living room in Highlands Ranch. 
 
 There happens to be another climber from Littleton at Mount Elbrus who has been able to facilitate communication between Beare’s family and Russian rescue teams. 
 
 Search and rescue had to call off the search on Sunday because of poor weather. 
 
 “They’re conservative in their search and rescues to protect their own men,” Olivia Beare said. 
 
 Colorado Rep. Mike Coffman sent a letter to the Russian ambassador to the U.S. on Wednesday asking for additional help. 
 
 In the meantime, Olivia Beare has also hired private rescuers to continue the search. However, progress is slow. 
 
 The man she hired to search by foot hasn’t been approved for a visa to enter Russia. And the helicopter teams she hired haven’t been able to deploy because of whiteout conditions on top of the mountain. 
 
 “They are hoping to go out at sunrise (Thursday). The storm is not fully cleared but it’s getting clearer,” she said. 
 
 The only thing Olivia Beare has left to do is hope. 
 
 “I hope he knows that I’m doing everything I can do find him,” she said. “I hope that he’s really pushing himself to be stubborn and strong and stay alive.” 
 
 The private rescue helicopters cost $2,500 per hour. They have already paid for five hours of searching, but might need more. 
 
 The family is asking for donations to help cover costs. ||||| Littleton Police officer Steven Beare is missing from a solo ascent of the tallest mountain in Russia. 
 
 Beare, a Colorado National Guardsman who has deployed multiple times, went missing while climbing Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus region of southern Russia, according to his wife, Olivia Beare. 
 
 Tass, the Russian news agency, reported that Beare was supposed to return to a checkpoint on June 16, but did not report in. Tass reported that an eight-person, high-mountain search and rescue team was retracing Beare’s route, but Olivia Beare said they stopped looking on Sunday. 
 
 Mount Elbrus, at 18,510 feet, is also the tallest mountain in Europe. 
 
 Olivia Beare told Denver7 that she spoke with her husband on June 12 when he first arrived in Russia. 
 
 Beare last attempted phone calls from the mountain on Saturday, according to the Colorado Police Officers Foundation, which is raising money to finance a private search team. His exact location is unknown due to a severe blizzard. 
 
 CPOF described Beare as an experienced alpinist who was climbing Mount Elbrus in pursuit of bagging the seven highest peaks in the world. He has extensive training, including in cold weather situations. 
 
 The Beares have a 20-month-old son and Olivia is 11-weeks pregnant with their second child. 
 
 “We need him to come home to his wife and family and your help in this effort is both needed and greatly appreciated,” the CPOF’s website said. ||||| LITTLETON, Colo. — A Colorado officer and National Guardsman is missing in Russia and his family, friends and coworkers are working feverishly to locate him on a remote mountain. 
 
 Olivia Beare, wife of Steven Beare, said her husband, a Littleton Police Department officer, went missing while climbing Mount Elbrus in Russia on June 16. 
 
 She said it was her husband's first solo climb without a guide. 
 
 The last time Beare spoke to him was on Monday night when he first arrived in the country. 
 
 "We know that there was a really bad storm that came in really quick out of nowhere," Beare said. "We're thinking that's when he got lost." 
 
 A few days after he first went missing, Beare said a blizzard hit the mountain. 
 
 "My biggest fear is that he's freezing to death, and he's alone somewhere in the snow, and I don't know if he's going to make it," Beare said. "I'm really scared." 
 
 Beare said a Russian team began looking for him on Sunday, but had to call off their search due to weather. 
 
 She is currently working with family and friends to deploy private search crews, along with two helicopters who will fly above the mountain once the weather permits. 
 
 "My husband was deployed multiple times and I never have worried about him, or worried for him to come home like I have the last three days," Beare said 
 
 Beare said her husband traveled to Russia to take on his second of the world's seven highest peaks — he has already climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He's an avid climber who has taken on more than 20 of Colorado's 14,000 foot mountains. 
 
 As Beare continues to organize efforts to search for her husband, her friends and Beare's fellow officer's are raising funds to help pay for expenses on the ground. 
 
 Those interested in donating to the efforts can make donations here, or send a check to the Colorado Police Officers Foundation at 2701 W. 84th Ave. #211 in Westminster, CO 80031. In both instances, write Steven Beare's name in the notes section of the donation. 
 
 "I just picture him walking out of the storm into clear skies, I don't know if it will happen," Beare said. "He's on the mountain somewhere." ||||| Mount Everest seen from peak Gokyo Ri in Nepal. (Hans Edinger/AP) 
 
 29,029. 
 
 That’s how many feet in the air the peak of Mount Everest towers in Nepal, and over 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’s song to some high achievers. In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay offered photographic evidence that proved the feat achievable. Achievable, yes, but maddeningly difficult. The quest to reach (and return from) it has cost more than 250 lives over the years. It’s such a herculean task that it’s 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.” 
 
 The 34-year-old Strydom, a lecturer at Monash Business School in Melbourne, Australia, had a message she wanted to share with the world: Veganism is not a handicap. 
 
 [Scale Everest on your screen right now and see what challenges climbers face] 
 
 The family of vegan climber Maria Strydom spoke about their shock at her death on Mount Everest. Strydom and her husband had set out to climb the mountain to prove a vegan diet can sustain extreme physical challenges. (AP) 
 
 She and her husband, a veterinarian, both stuck closely to their vegan diet — no animal products whatsoever, which extends from scrambled eggs to most chocolate chip cookies — and they experienced criticism because of it. 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 would have to wait on Everest, though. 
 
 [Climbing Everest isn’t enough for these guys. They’re doing it without oxygen] 
 
 The mountain’s top 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 as 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, CNN reported. 
 
 That gave the couple time to train vigorously. In the intervening years, they proved that their diet would not keep them from mountain-climbing by scaling Denali in Alaska, Mount Ararat in Turkey and Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, among others. 
 
 But Everest is Everest, and they wanted to tackle it, despite 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,” Kurt said. “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 4, the final camp, at 3,000 feet below the summit, before both suffered from altitude sickness. It caused fluid to build up in Strydom’s brain, which killed her Saturday. Gropel, alive but fighting a fluid buildup in his lungs, had to be taken down the mountain by sled, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. He was taken to a hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal. 
 
 The devastated family of Dr Maria Strydom are still seeking details about her death. https://t.co/shBmD8IQmj pic.twitter.com/eRcOWHO96I — 7 News Melbourne (@7NewsMelbourne) May 22, 2016 
 
 Heinz Gropel, Robert’s father, told the Australian that Robert will probably recover, at least in the body. 
 
 “Physically he’s OK, we think,” Heinz 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 three climbers seemingly in the primes of their respective lives — one has to be to scale Everest — to have succumbed the mountain’s many dangers since Thursday. 
 
 The latest, according to the Associated Press: Subhash Paul, an Indian climber who had fallen sick and was being helped down the mountain by Sherpa guides when he died overnight. “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, Paresh Nath and Goutam Ghosh, are now missing, CNN reported. “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, about 30 more climbers have become sick, frostbitten or both near the summit during the past few days, the AP reported. 
 
 
 
 Light illuminates Mount Everest on Nov. 30, 2015. (Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters) 
 
 Another member of Strydom and Gropel’s climbing party, 36-year-old Eric Arnold, also died. 
 
 For him, the quest was one instilled since childhood. The professional mountaineer and motivational speaker, whom The Washington Post’s Annie Gowen profiled before he attempted his climb, had tried in three previous years to scale the mountain. It was his life’s passion. As he told The Post, “Mount Everest is my big childhood dream.” Hanging over his teenage bed were two posters: one of actress and model Pamela Anderson and one less seen in young men’s bedrooms, 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 from altitude sickness during his descent, the Associated Press reported. 
 
 Bergbeklimmer Eric Arnold bereikt top Mount Everest bij vijfde poging https://t.co/oeswLrfXyd pic.twitter.com/991NvMg6Op — Eric Arnold (@EricArnold8850) May 20, 2016 
 
 Although 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 evening. 
 
 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. 
 
 Twenty-five-year-old Phurba Sherpa plunged to his death Thursday while attempting to fix a route for future climbers about 500 feet under the summit, CNN reported. Although deaths of the men and women who attempt to scale the mountain each year often make headlines, those of the Nepalese Sherpas who both guide climbers and perform maintenance along the route rarely do. 
 
 The Sherpas have worked on the mountain for so long that National Geographic reported, “‘sherpa’ with a small ‘s’ has come to signify anyone who carries loads.” These are the people who set up Base Camp, install and fix ropes throughout the path to the summit and guide paying climbers to the top. The work pays extraordinarily well, anywhere from $4,000 to $30,000 a season in a country with an annual per capita income of $700. 
 
 But it’s dangerous work, and Phurba Sherpa is far from the first to perish while performing it. Outside magazine reported the annual fatality rate for Everest Sherpas from 2004 to 2014 to be 4,053 per 100,000 (as compared with miners, 25 in 100,000, or commercial fishermen, 124 in 100,000). That number is admittedly skewed, as there aren’t many performing the work and the 2014 avalanches caused that number to spike. (It was 1,332 per 100,000 from 2000 to 2010). Still, the result is striking and shows again how dangerous the mountain can be, even for those who know it best. 
 
 
 
 International trekkers pass through a glacier at the Mount Everest base camp in Nepal. (Tashi Sherpa/AP) 
 
 On Everest, death is not necessarily a sign of failure so much as one of a particularly sad inevitability. Much like many places humans have ventured in our boundless curiosity — from the ocean depths to outer space — it cannot sustain life, and it often takes it. Shrestha told the BBC that altitude sickness and fatigue, along with natural factors such as blizzards and avalanches, kill a few climbers each year. It’s a potential outcome known to its 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 believed to be the body of Tsewang Paljor, a young Indian climber who died in a 1996 blizzard, Outside reported. To reach the summit on the north side of the mountain, climbers sometimes have to step over his frozen legs, which are capped by the green shoes that have earned the body the nickname “Green Boots.” 
 
 Filmmaker Elia Saikaly's touching tribute to his friend Dan Fredinburg and others who lost their lives as an avalanche hit Mount Everest base camp set off by a magnitude-7.8 quake in Nepal. (Elia Saikaly/6summitschallenge) 
 
 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 Everest’s summit 15 times, told the 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.” 
 
 1 of 21 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × The dangerous road to Mount Everest View Photos Hundreds of climbers attempt to scale the world’s highest mountain, a feat which comes with inherent dangers. Caption Hundreds of climbers attempt to scale the world’s highest mountain, a feat which comes with inherent dangers. Aug. 26, 2000 The southern face of Mount Everest, known locally as Sagarmatha, soars above the monsoon clouds at the border of Nepal and Tibet. John McConnico/AP Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 This post has been updated.
– A police officer and national guardsman from Colorado is missing on Russia's tallest mountain, the Denver Post reports. Steven Beare, attempting his first solo climb without a guide, was due at a checkpoint June 16 but never arrived. "We know that there was a really bad storm that came in really quick out of nowhere," his wife Olivia Beare tells ABC 7. "We're thinking that's when he got lost." According to Russian media, an eight-person rescue team tried to follow Beare's route on Mount Elbrus but gave up the search Sunday. Olivia Beare is currently paying a private rescue team $2,500 an hour to continue looking for her husband. The Colorado Police Officers Foundation is collecting donations. Beare, an Army veteran with a young child and another on the way, has been climbing for five years, KDVR reports. His goal was to summit the world's seven highest peaks; he had already climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Olivia Beare, who hasn't spoken to her husband since he arrived in Russia on June 12, says he has the skills to survive a blizzard but may be injured. "I'm really scared," she tells ABC 7. She adds to KDVR: "I can’t raise two babies by myself." Littleton Police Chief Doug Stephens says cops "fight through and win" when things seem hopeless, and he's sure Beare is doing just that.