As long as Cheriese Carrasco has worked at the Budget Inn Durango – over six years now – Stew Scheppegrell would appear every 12 days during the summer.
He restocked on food, collected his mail at the outdoor store he used as an address and then returned to his reclusive lifestyle in the Weminuche Wilderness north of Lemon Reservoir.
Stew did not own a phone, or even a wallet. He communicated with his younger brother John and sister-in-law Leslie Scheppegrell through brief letters mailed to and from Backcountry Experience.
“He wanted to be hiking and backpacking and camping out in the wilderness, and so that’s what he did,” Leslie said.
When Stew’s body was found near his tent off the Burnt Timber Trail north of Lemon Reservoir on Aug. 24, he left behind no will but had named the Durango Food Bank as the beneficiary of over $30,000 in his savings account.
Stew’s cause of death is undetermined, County Coroner Jann Smith said, but the manner was natural. He was 79.
Stewart James Scheppegrell was born in Baltimore on Feb. 17, 1945, and grew up in New Orleans. He had six siblings.
Although he got a degree in accounting, Stew’s foray into the profession was brief.
“He decided that wasn’t the kind of life he wanted to live,” Leslie said.
Stew moved first to Boulder and eventually on to Prescott, Arizona, where he worked at a mountaineering store. Sometime in the early 2000s, he retired and moved to the mountains outside Durango.
The reticent man had just three haunts: Backcountry Experience, where he found a kindred spirit in the store’s owner, Ben Rockis; the Budget Inn; and the Weminuche.
He did not speak on the phone, but Stew would respond to letters from his family in scant words.
“Usually the card would say something very simple like, ‘Peace, love, joy, sunshine and the flowers of living in the Weminuche Wilderness. Love, Stew,’” Leslie said.
Stew was quite cared for by the few business owners who knew him and the drivers who gave him rides into town and back out to the trailhead near Transfer Park Campground.
“In my mind, he was part of my family, he was part of the family here at Backcountry Experience (and) we liked seeing him,” Rockis said. “He did bring a smile to us because we knew he was doing what we wished we could do.”
The two met when Stew arrived in town around 2005. He wandered into the shop looking for gear and bonded with Rockis over their shared experience in the outdoor industry.
Despite an aversion to sharing personal stories, Stew once proudly told Rockis of the night a bear impressed its face through wall of his tent.
“Stew was just like ‘Whack! Leave me alone!’ And the bear wandered off,” Rockis said. “He was very happy to tell me that story.”
Carrasco, the Budget Inn’s general manager, said Stew appeared with a smile and kept his room impeccably clean – it didn’t even collect dust. He had few needs or desires, aside from a proclivity for solitude and open space.
“I think he really, just hiked for the last 20 years of his life,” she said. “He didn’t want to go back to a desk job.”
He lived a cyclically simple lifestyle.
When snow would fall and the hotel began monthly room rentals in mid-October, Stew would return and stay the winter unless conditions were particularly mild that year. He left for the wilderness as soon as temperatures allowed, sometime in May.
“He hated being inside all winter long,” Carrasco said. “He would sit in the hotel room and just stare out the window, and on nice days, he would go out and take a hike and then come back.”
Carrasco noticed last summer that Stew’s habitual arrival and departure times were growing erratic. He would show up a few days early or a few days late but be under the impression he was on schedule.
So this year, Carrasco blocked out room 108 – Stew’s favorite – for most of the summer so it would be available when he appeared.
The room was still marked “reserved” on Friday.
When Carrasco said goodbye to Stew in mid-July, she had a feeling it would be the last time the two saw each other.
Stew didn’t appear well; he was looking older, grayer; he loitered for his ride back to Lemon a day earlier than scheduled and although he always stayed in room 108, he left his trekking poles outside someone else’s door thinking it was his own.
But no one was going to try to engage in a futile effort to prevent him from going back into the woods.
“He told one of his younger sisters at one point a few years ago that when he died, he wanted to die in the wilderness and have wolves eat him,” Leslie said.
In the end, his wishes proved borderline prophetic.
Stew died in his tent, it appeared, and was pulled out by a bear. His body was found about a month later by a horseback riding outfitter.
He didn’t leave a trace except a savings account at TBK bank that contained over $30,000, the remainder of a family inheritance.
“He made the beneficiary Durango Food Bank because we wanted to help seniors and homeless people,” Leslie said.
John and Leslie scattered Stew’s remains in the Weminuche Wilderness.
rschafir@durangoherald.com
