OBITUARY: BRIAN SIEBERT 1973-2026
“Every morning at the Mill, he was feeding people,” said Logan Thomas, remembering Brian Seibert. Banana pancakes, bacon, breakfast tacos… all cooked on a grill he kept loaded in the back of his Subaru.
Then Seibert would go snowboarding, and by his friends’ accounts, he was the fastest rider on the mountain. At 53, he rode forward on the board with his hands behind his back, in a red flannel, and they called him the Silver Surfer.
Seibert, a Crowley Lake resident, died last week while descending from a summit hike on Mt. Morgan, a peak just over 13,000 feet.
Mono County Search and Rescue was paged Monday, Oct. 5, for an overdue hiker who had last been heard from the night before, after setting out on the mountain’s North Ridge.
A register on the summit showed he had reached the top. On Tuesday, a California National Guard Chinook crew spotted him near the bottom of Grand Central Couloir, and searchers who had followed a single set of tracks down the gully reached him. Search and rescue described it as an “unsurvivable fall.” He was recovered early Wednesday by a Yosemite National Park helicopter.
Seibert had moved to Crowley from Anaheim about a year ago, a more than 30-year return after he spent a number of years snowboarding here in the ‘90s.
He was 18 when he first moved up, working first as a janitor for Mammoth Mountain, then at Nik-N-Willie’s Pizza-n-Subs. Filmmaker Todd Hazeltine met him in 1993, and put him in a snowboard film that winter.
“It was a small local crew when Brian moved up to the mountains,” Hazeltine said. “It was a very tight, small crew. It was kind of before snowboarding got big at Mammoth.”
He met Sundi Reince during that time.
“I worked at Wave Rave and I had a crush on him,” she remembered. “He was a really good snowboarder, and everyone was bragging about him.”
The two started dating, moved to Idaho in 1997, and married in 2001. They had two children together, Evan and Kai, now 25 and 21 respectively. He worked as a professional chef, winning awards and working at high-end restaurants while in Idaho, and got his children on skateboards and snowboards as soon as they could walk.
“We always wanted to be just like him all the way up until the end,” Evan said. “He was our best friend.”
Seibert and Reince divorced in 2006, but remained friends. They moved to the Oregon Coast together with Kai and Evan in 2015, and he moved back to Anaheim in 2018.
When he returned to Mammoth last year, his new friends said he still rode like he did in the ‘90s, and the ski bum side of him hadn’t disappeared.
“He was down to just rough it, to hang out with the crew,” said Logan Thomas, who met Seibert at a hot spring on a night early last winter.
He and Seibert spent that first night talking over beers. The next morning they met up at the Mill, rode together, and kept riding together all season. Christian, who was there that night and asked to be identified by his first name only, said he and Seibert skied more than 100 days together.
Though Seibert had his own place, he spent most of his time camping with the van-life crowd in a Subaru Crosstrek, with a sleeping bag in the back, a grill and a propane tank. Christian said he had a bed built out in the back and a table to cook on.
When they met, Seibert wasn’t working. He had been working odd jobs while in Anaheim, and had been hurt on a construction job and moved up to rest his shoulder and snowboard.
Eventually he took a job at the meat counter at Vons, where Thomas said he got to take home trimmings that would otherwise be thrown out.
Thomas said he liked the job because could listen to punk rock all night, then spend the days on the mountain.
Wherever the group set up, Seibert cooked.
“He was always our camp chef,” Thomas said.
When people wandered over from other vans to see what was going on, Seibert made sure there was enough for them too. The night before his last hike, Christian said, Seibert came home from a day in the mountains with a friend and cooked dinner for everyone.
“I mean, it was something you’d get at a five-star restaurant,” Christian said of the dish Seibert made. “That’s just the kind of guy he was.”
