Beloved local dies in climbing accident

Scott Sederstrom was 44.

Longtime local Scott Sederstrom, 44, passed away in a climbing accident on Friday, March 13 in the Owens River Gorge. East Side friends remember him as a genuine, caring, and spiritual man, always living in the moment and up for the next adventure as he climbed and skied through life while working as a nurse at Mammoth Hospital.

Born in Colorado but raised in Kallispell, Montana, near Glacier National Park, Sederstrom grew up skiing, mountaineering, and rock climbing, according to his fiancé, Suzanne DeBono.

“He was an amazingly gifted athlete and he was into it from a very young age,” she said. She recounted school projects Sederstrom still had, talking about his dreams of skiing, climbing mountains and being out in nature. “It was something he always planned on doing and he ended up getting to live the life he wanted. Most people don’t get to do that.”

After becoming a nurse in Montana, Sederstrom came through Mammoth on a ski trip, applied for a job at Mammoth Hospital, and was hired in 1995, according to longtime friend and former roommate Jim Ouimet.  “He was the man … I mean I couldn’t ask for a better brother.”

Ouimet recounted when Sederstrom skinned up to the top of Mount Ritter, spent the night and then skied down into Tuolumne Meadows in the middle of winter. “He’s the only guy a knew that whenever he wanted to do something, he’d go do it. But he’d never brag about his accomplishments. He was so down to earth.”

“Scott was the go-to guy for a mountain adventure,” friend Mark Shelp said. “So many people have stories and pictures with Scott on adventures because Scott was always there.”

“He lived on the fringe for the longest time— circling the wagons with a funny group of mountain freaks off the scenic loop or down the hot springs in the summer,” said friend and colleague Dr. Pete Clark. “For a while he lived in a yurt behind the old Gomez’s, and then a meticulously self constructed camper/Sprinter back before Sprinters became ubiquitous.”

Over the last twenty years in the Eastern Sierra, Sederstrom climbed, hiked the PCT twice, ran ultramarathons, skied the backcountry, mountain biked, and also became a massage therapist. He also lived in Bend, Flagstaff, Salt Lake City, Reno, and most recently Santa Cruz, where he taught himself how to surf before returning to Mammoth in 2011. “He kept coming back. He couldn’t stay away,” DeBono said.

And he always returned to Mammoth Hospital, where his nursing profession allowed him the time to do the things he really loved. “He was a really good nurse,” said DeBono, who worked in the recovery room. “You get the same story from his patients and the people whose lives he touched as you would from anyone… He was a really good listener. He could have some point of commonality with just about anybody.”

“At work at Mammoth Hospital as a nurse, he was kind and reassuring, and projected the same quiet confidence as he did in outdoor pursuits,” Clark said.

“Scott was the original lifestyle nurse,” said longtime friend Dan Molnar. “He was a decade ahead of the many climbers who have recently figured out what a great career nursing is for maintaining the climber-skier lifestyle.”

Molnar said what made Scott remarkable was not his athletic ability or unabashed enthusiasm for adventure, but rather “it was Scott’s Zen approach to life, his gentle demeanor, his ability to appreciate everything you had to say, his propensity to climb or ski for the day well below his limit in order to facilitate a fun adventure for everyone. Scott was in it for the moment—not for the climbing grades, not for the angle of the couloir, and certainly not for the bragging rights.”

All of Sederstrom’s friends described his genuine humility; something that DeBono first noticed when they met at Travertine Hot Springs outside of Bridgeport in 2012. She was working as a nurse in Reno and driving back from southern California on highway 395 (which she usually never did) stopping at the hot spring just as the sun was setting.

Like so many other people, Sederstrom’s malamute, Yogi, approached DeBono first, “He was a shy guy … when I met him, I had no idea that he skied well, or climbed, or any of that stuff because he didn’t talk about that,” DeBono said. “We knew that we would be life partners pretty quickly … He is the love of my life. He was it for me and I was it for him. Most people don’t ever experience that in their whole lives so I’m lucky.”

DeBono moved to Mammoth soon after, and they moved to Paradise last year. “Every morning we would sit in the hot tub and drink coffee,” DeBono said. “We’d sit out here and just say, ‘Oh my gosh. I can’t believe we get to live this life.’

“We’ve crammed more in three years than most people do in a lifetime,” DeBono said. Sederstrom taught DeBono how to climb and they traveled to Red Rocks, Joshua Tree, and Yosemite, among other places. They had a trip planned in May to climb in Greece and Turkey.

“He was a very confident climber. He was beautiful to watch climbing … like poetry in motion,” she said. “Everywhere we went we climbed, we mountain biked … at one point my son asked me if I was ever going to stop being on vacation,” she remembered, laughing.

They were planning a wedding in September.

Sederstrom wasn’t home when DeBono got off of work on Friday, which was unusual given he had to be at the Hospital the next day. “He’s super responsible about work and he’s usually home early,” she said. Noticing that Sederstrom’s van and Yogi were gone, DeBono assumed he was out on some adventure with friends. When he still wasn’t home a few hours later, DeBono began to worry.

She called Inyo County Sheriff Department around 11 p.m., but was told Search and Rescue couldn’t be sent out until they knew where he was. “I had no idea. He could have been anywhere, in any canyon,” she said. So DeBono drove up and down Rock Creek, Pine Creek and Owens Gorge Road searching for Sedarstrom’s van. Then she remembered he had mentioned the mini-traction (a self-belay technique) route in the Sub Gorge, even through they hardly ever climbed there.

She found Yogi sitting next to Sederstrom’s van in the parking lot around midnight “and that was a really bad sign,” she said, since the dog was always with him. “Scott was very strong, mentally and physically, and he’s been seriously injured before and hauled himself out. I knew it had to be really bad.”

DeBono began walking up and down the road, but wasn’t able to approach any of the walls in the dark. Inyo County Sheriff Deputies also joined in the search, and as dawn began to break so did several friends and other climbers, as well as Mono County Search and Rescue. Around 9 a.m., friends found Sederstrom’s body— cause of death traumatic injuries due to a fall.

Sederstrom was rope soloing a 10b rated-climb on the Silent Pillar Wall in the Sub Gorge, a fairly remote section where few people climb, according to DeBono. She asked Search and Rescue what happened and was told a bolt failed and “if a bolt fails, what are you going to do?” she said. “He’s usually very methodical. Very careful. He’s confident but not overly confident. So I was just shocked.”

Ouimet agreed: “That doesn’t make a bit of sense to me. He was one of the safest climbers I know. He did it all the time by himself. Fortunately he died doing what he loved, doing it in a place that he loved.”

“Those of us who shared summits with Scott will consider ourselves fortunate for the rest of our lives. He was a gentle warrior whose soul will linger in these hills until the end of time,” Molnar said.

“He was perpetually starry-eyed and in love with the Eastern Sierra, he had seen the light and cherished the range and the adventure to be found in it,” Clark remembered. “He was an eternal East Side fixture and one of the people that gave our town soul.”

Sederstrom is survived by his mother in Missoula, Montana, and his brother in Seattle. A memorial was held at DeBono’s house in Paradise on Thursday, March 19.